The Bouldercreek Angler

Watch out for this one! Betty calls it "a tome". I am reluctant to press her on the matter, but I fear it cannot be comforting.

2012-01-28T11:26:00.000-08:00

A New Opera, Shakespeare, and Me

For sixty-five years I have been working, in one way or another, but steadily, with Shakespeare. The first stage production I saw of one of the plays was King Henry IV. Part One. Bewildered by much of what I saw, I was nevertheless convinced that something greatly important was going on. So, I took to acting as Leontes in Winter’s Tale.

In a couple years, there came those two films by Laurence Olivier, his Henry V and Hamlet. It is utterly impossible to describe the impact those two “movies” had upon us. No one I knew had ever seen or even dreamed of such things. They were for us the music of which Caliban dreamed and waked to dream again. They taught us so much and moved us so deeply that we were forever changed.

IN MEMORIAM

2012-01-17T09:03:00.000-08:00

KAY LOHRENZ CHRISTOPHERSON

1936-- 2012

she lived and loved in spite of everything

January 9, 2012

That early September day of 1950, in Powell Wyoming, on that day when I was to begin the life of a teacher: it went like this:

I walked into the room, tenth grade English, looked about me, and there she was, half way back on my right, in the second to the window row of desks.

Twelve of Them

2011-12-22T09:23:00.000-08:00

Some say that ever gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

This bird of dawning singeth all night long.

And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Photo Trial for Christmas post Grange

2011-12-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

2011-12-11T12:27:00.001-08:00

Discovering the Altona Grange

In the Nick of Time for Christmas

All my life they were standing out there-- out in the country. I used to drive by one of them out pheasant hunting. Those Grange Halls. I had no idea of what they were beyond their probably having something to do with farming. But, sadly, I lacked the curiosity to find out more about them.

Then, now, old as I am, the recent meeting of the Gold Hill Club was invited to meet in the Altona Grange, half a dozen miles or so due north of Boulder. And there it was, the ritual building, where I learned what I now cannot imagine having lived this long without. It was a revelation.

The New TV Season

2011-11-14T14:53:00.000-08:00

By One with an Agenda

The most extraordinary thing has happened on prime-time television. We had been watching for the start-up of the new series “Hell on Wheels” on AMC-- about the push West to build the transcontinental railroad. Surely an interesting subject, don’t you think.

11-1-11

2011-11-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

It’s All Hallows, the day to honor and supplicate all the saints at once. Maybe you would call it economical, but It feels good to me anyway. You have to admit that the Church really knew how to use the calendar.

Not to mention that it’s one of those Number One days this year. 11.1.11 Think of that! Why is it so impressive, Numbers are plumb mysterious…. even to mathematicians, I’m told.

And tomorrow is All Souls, the day for me to remember and think of and appreciate all my dead. Good souls all. They were my good luck.

Thank heaven that Christ Mass is on its way. Though I don’t believe a word of it, I am nevertheless profoundly affected by and drawn to it. I look forward to the Angels’ singing.

And speaking of not believing in it, we spent early Halloween at the film Anonymous. All that Elizabethan stuff about the Queen, her lovers, and some jerk named Shakespeare.

A guy leaving the movie ahead of he turned back to say, ”Bunk, right?” Yup that’s it; the film is sumptuous bunk. It’s a fantasy of Elizabethan politics and scandal with a sub-plot of Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Well, it’s the old story: third rate poet, Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford. He’s characterized in the film as the very model of the romantic, post-Goethean artist, too pure, too tormented, too special, too soulful and rare for this world. His life is a longing for release from his suffering in the act of writing poetry.

A man like that in Shakespeare’s London would have been so rare as to be freakish. Shakespeare and his fellows were, and thought of themselves as workmen, as makers of poems, and plays, and paintings, and dances, and architecture, and statues, and music. We forget that our idea of the artist is largely an idol of the nineteenth century. But we enjoyed the movie, even if it did ask us to believe the blockbuster of historical fiction that the queen’s lover was her own son! The blockbuster continues to bust when we are told that their son was no other than the Earl of Southampton, who is now no longer possibly Shakespeare’s lover, but the “secret son” to whom DeVere dedicates those sonnets of “his”. How’s that for movie making!

I read that the movie makers are distributing a “study guide” to distribute in high schools, the better for our children to understand the Shakespeare phenomenon.

Socrates was made to drink the hemlock for talking sense to the youth of Athens. Today big money is made talking pure bosh to students.

Fishing Our Flies on Henry's

2011-10-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

Naval Discipline in the Rockies

Back then, In a long lost season, when Bill Woods and I had but a single day to fish the famous Henry's Lake in Idaho, we put to sea in the early morning dark. Bill was captain in command. I was an able-bodied seaman and had been detailed to bring a gunny sack from home to tie alongside the boat for keeping alive three fat cutthroats each, for home and oven.

A Good New Book

2011-09-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

AND THEY WENT OUT

INTO THE WILDERNESS OF THEIR PROFESSION

I have just read a really good book. Eric and Libby Ericson, of Boulder and Santa Fe, have joined hands to present the experience of their early lives together when they deployed their courage and devotion to go far abroad in the professional search for oil, but more deeply and truly into the fundamental strata of the human mystery of family. There were the rocks to probe, dangerous politics, strange diseases amid myriad languages-- and the children, “the boys”.

It is a compelling look at the geology of oil and family life, all of it told in a most remarkable modesty. They never speak for their competence, but we as readers never for a moment doubt it. The book is a cultural marker showing us a model of what was once possible in America:

An Oil Geologist Abroad: Exploration with Family:

Bolivia, Spain and Nigeria 1956-1966 (Santa Fe, 2011)

Built as the Ericsons have built it, their book is that rare thing, a necessary book. Its subject has rights. It is to be written and published. It is what writing is for.

Eric and Libby follow one another with short essay-like sketches, one after the other from field to home and back again, Eric looks for oil in structures of unexplored rocks of Bolivia, Spain, and Nigeria. Libby’s hugely devoted effort is to get that family going and make it prosper.

Searching and Breeding

This book, a vivid portrait of an American family at an historically loaded moment in the nation’s life and a submission of evidence, documenting what now seems an almost magical time in our lives and our culture. It is memoir, history, sociology, science, even romance. I think it must be unique.

The 1950’s --A time, often decried as a static culture of conformity and lack-luster pursuit of dreary middle class comforts, securities, and regularities, is something quite different in this book. There were those young people back then with a fine new, public education for the professions, who were suddenly presented with the challenge to Go Out, almost in a Biblical sense, to do good and to serve.

And knowing what they wanted, they were ready to learn fully how to do it. They went out as young families to breed and to spread the good news of their liberal learning and vision in the wildest of unexplored places.

I write this, of course, in the only way I can, as a man who, like Eric Ericson, was accompanied by a remarkable woman, who was at least as ready as he for anything.

Libby Ericson, educated in fine arts, gets her say in this book of alternating essays. I think it might be read as a text in early feminism. What proves my point and is so astonishing about the book is the balance between the alternating essays. Male and female created He them. There is not the slightest hint of male dominance or compromise anywhere in the book. The woman, at this early moment, appears as not just an equal power with her husband, but as one who has always been such. This balance between the essays is the balance between souls.

Style? The writing is good, clear, economic, educated, and self-edited. I would call it, “American Plain”. Some sentences run urgently on under the buoyant pressure of the essential narrative, and verbs, in their hurry, can fall quickly into the passive. But, it is a style with a draw to it, meaning that it keeps pulling the reader eagerly forward with the narrative. It is rigorously anti-metaphoric, uncolored, forthright, and seemingly unconscious of itself as literature. It is just right for its task.

But, as I write this, I cannot keep from musing on how this book clarifies and gives a local habitation to what many of us experienced and felt back then, at the center of that magnificent storm of education that was the G I Bill of Rights.

I see a bit more clearly, from reading this book, where that education sent even me, I see that I too went out into a wilderness of exploration, in no way comparable to that wild, big, brave thing the Ericsons did, but still…. Still, I think that many of us back then (I am a couple years older than the Ericsons) went out, in the midst of what was The American Century and lived crazy, productive lives and sometimes left a mark.

Ours was the culture of science. Even in the arts, science was a model. Bertolt Brecht, a voice for many of us, spoke of himself as “a child of the age of science”. That’s what I always wanted to be-- like Eric Ericson.

But today it’s all gone to hell. We are threatened with the leadership of those who want only to live private lives of private wealth, oiling their hinges at the public supply-- all the while preening themselves with their religious suspicions of evolution, global warming, and science in general!

Bad Luck! They, in their particular, are not the affirmation of humanity we thought they might become when, back then, we were teaching them. We had gone out into the wilderness of the future to do our work and look what we got!

But, I must not loose sight of what we got in this book, a testimonial to what once was and might be again in the human family.

Christmas, 1945: Betty and I talked of Upsula, but we didn’t go.

Gordon Wickstrom

September 12, 2011

2011-08-24T15:13:00.001-07:00

SCHOOL FOR POLITICIANS

WHEN IN THE MUSIC HALL WATCH YOURSELF

NEVER CROSS THE PLAYERS

THE CLOWNS,

THE FOOLS

THE MAKERS OF THE MUSIC

THE ACROBATS

THE HORSES

AND THE TELLERS OF THE TALES

NEVER ALLOW THEM TO TAKE YOUR MEASURE.

NEVER GET ON OR OFF ON THEIR WRONG SIDE.

THEY ARE ALWAYS RIGHT

EVEN WHEN THEY ARE LEFT

THEY ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE MOST HIGH

Let them be well us’d for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.
After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

Hamlet

1946- 1950

2011-08-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

for anglers too young to remember

Under correction, I want to make the case that those four short years of my title, immediately after WW II, were a period of expansion in the technology of angling unmatched in the history of the sport. Never before or since has so much happened so fast. So much and so fast that I hardly know where to begin this narrative.

IN MEMORIAM

2011-07-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

Frank Brady

July 14, 2011

Frank didn’t quite make 85, but he took off, anyway, down the mountain ahead of us carrying the load of meat. Don and Bill and I stumble along behind and will catch up all too soon.

Seven Is a Natural

2011-06-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

MY DOCTORS

Therein the patient must minister to himself

Macbeth V.iii

I have fully seven of them, a consortium of Boulder physicians, minding me in my old age. Seven excellent men dedicated to the care and repair of my human body. The most respected of men along with the clergy, the postman, and the man from Prudential-- and, dare I add, teachers-- even if, in the end, they can no longer deliver the goods.

Midsummer 2011

2011-06-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

A few moments ago at 11:16 AM, MDT, Spring closed down and Summer opened up. MIDSUMMER Now the action of the days and nights will be ripening and the movement: toward Harvest, as the days get shorter and shorter, darker and darker. It will now be allowable, I am happy to say, to think of the coming of Christmas. It's an important day: Midsummer.

Sixty-three years ago, at about this exact hour, we were on the first day of our honeymoon, having left Denver for points north to Yellowstone for the fishing. Well past Cheyenne in our 1937 Chevrolet coupe, we began to hear that worst of all sounds in all the world: a bearing had burned out in our engine, and the piston rod was trying to hammer its way out of the engine block. We limped into tiny Glendo and there spent three of the most remarkable days our lives. (Read all about it in Notes from an Old Fly Book.)

My point is: if you must venture forth on Midsummer, be cautious. There are strange forces at work.

I call to mind J.M. Barrie's highly popular West End and Broadway circa 1900 play DEAR BRUTUS. In it a fashionable assortment of dreadfully messed-up, unhappy people respond to an invitation to spend a long week-end at a grand country estate, south of London in Surrey, the home of the strange and eccentric Mr. Lobb. Of course it is Midsummer (Why else would I bring it up? And, of course, Shakespeare haunts this play too.)

Old Lobb warns his guests that they should not venture out into his Woods that night, that it is extremely dangerous.

And so, of course, that is exactly what they all do. They go out there and encounter forces that enable them to go back and relive and redirect their lives away from all the destructive frailties that ruin our lives. The guests are highly excited and go about changing themselves.

When they come out of the Woods at dawn, they find that they have made the same terrible choices, taken the same wrong turnings, and are still as utterly miserable as they were before this Midsummer night. Old Lobb is full of glee.

So, I say, Beware!

Cassius: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

but in ourselves that we are underlings.

Julius Caesar

Betty and I took our chances this morning and drove out into the country and had breakfast at a country crossroad. We took our chances as we begin our 64th. year of risking it. We have the protective spell of Glendo still working for us.

Writing About It

2011-06-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

It troubles me. I retired from my life as a teacher and stage director in 1991, fully expecting to be close to the end of Everything. And here I am, twenty years later, at this keyboard, writing-- about angling and, as I have threatened, about everything else. I have delighted in the discovery that most anything can be thinly disguised and stuck into talk of fishing. All sorts of ideas can peak through the remarkably expansive and elastic language of angling.

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

2011-05-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

My children think me foolishly optimistic-- almost shallow-mindedly so. They feel that they are doomed to a new dark ages as the powers of darkness sweep over their landscape, social, political, and economic. They cannot trust in their intense liberal idealisms, nor their intellectual acuities, and are in near despair.

My trust, my optimism, they feel is but the shredded, shoddy remnant of disgraced Enlightenment dreaming.

U S M

2011-05-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

for
May Day

If I begin today with reference to a famous, though now neglected Czech play from 1921 and appear to be lecturing you on it, please bear with me a minute as I try to build a little essay on a seminal issue of our national life. I promise to keep it brief.

The play is RUR-- meaning “Rossum’s Universal Robots” by playwright Karel Capek. It’s about how a futurist mega-industry develops a “race” of robots, slave-like workers for its immense industrial complex. Capek invented the word “robot “ from an ancient Slavic root meaning enslaving, or holding in bondage. The word caught on immediately and was swept up into the world’s languages.

Prayer at Breakfastime

2011-04-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

I was upset some weeks ago when President Obama spoke at a prayer breakfast in Washington. I was upset when he felt compelled to say how much he depended upon his Christian faith in his life and work. I was upset that he felt called upon to declare any kind of faith at all-- unless it were something like this little speech to the breakfasting prayerful politicians that I have composed for him here. Perhaps it will also make me feel better. Here it is:

ESSAY

2011-04-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

In what furnace was thy brain?

Blake

When things are as bad as they are these days, when even good people line up as Volunteers against the basic human decencies, it is useful to have something immense, remote, and beautiful with which to divert ourselves, something to muse upon without any nervous responsibility for its disposal. I need something crazy and wonderful, nicely beyond my daily worries, something that will in the end take care of itself and leave me to enjoy myself and to ponder, however uselessly, the imponderables.

I turn to Language for permission to pursue this or that obscurity with questions, questions quite beyond the limitations of my mind. But, I ask them anyway. Language bids me go ahead, ask away, and relax.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN or How a Nation's Youth May Be Corrupted

2011-03-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

It was after morning recess in Mrs. Winter’s sixth grade class at Mapleton School. I remember the moment precisely, when the boy behind me, right in the middle of the lesson, leaned over his desk and my shoulder to whisper in my ear that if I’d take a nickel down to Woolworths at Broadway and Pearl, I could buy this fishing “thing” with which I could catch lots of fish out at East Dagues Lake.

Another Old Hymn on the Social Network

2011-03-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

“I love to tell the story of unseen things above

because I know ‘tis true

…‘Twill be my theme in glory

To tell the old, old story”….

(the same old story)

My, how we did sing that hymn in church of a Sunday! …”of unseen things above”. Little did we know how those unseen things would become “ the cloud” up there where every thing from this computer can be networked-- with apps-- into a heavenly storage and returned to us with a blessing. And that, they say, is what everybody is talking about.

THE RING OF EGYPT

2011-02-24T15:06:00.000-08:00

The old hymn rang out with, “Faith of our fathers, living still / In spite of dungeon, fire and sword.” I remember how gladly we sang how earnestly. But not any more. The old faith has taken blow after blow in the last half-century and in many places is down nearly for the count.

Now in Egypt the new digital technology, the Social Network, has come fully into its own. A generation of dispossessed young people accomplished in a week social and political change that in the past would have taken years if not decades to bring about. Those young Egyptians left their father’s faith at home and went “wired” into the streets of Cairo to organize a revolution.

The electronic instruments they held in their hands turned out to be the most democratizing technology since the advent of the automobile. Those protesters were at all times intimately in touch with each other and under the immediate direction of a brilliant leadership.

Among our ancient fantasies is that of the magic ring that gives its wearer power over all the world. In Wagner’s immense music drama , “Der Ring des Niebelungen”, a ring made of gold stolen from the Rhine did the trick.

Oxford’s Professor Tolkien used the idea in his monumental fiction, The Lord of the Rings. We hold that fantasy in common of slipping a magic ring on our finger and enjoying complete power over our circumstances. But where to get one?

When I was a child, the “Little Orphan Annie” radio program at 5:30 every weekday evening, pulled us enchanted listeners into the fantasy by offering us just such a magic ring for ten cents and the seal from a jar of Ovaltine. Following the ring-- now get this-- the program offered a decoder pin, all glistening gold, a star, that we could bravely wear and have ready to decode special, secret messages sent us by the radio broadcast. It felt like power, to be hooked up in this way to a great confederation of listening kids like me.

Just like Egypt.

I confess, I still have my decoder pin, and can still believe in it-- at least as much as I can believe in my childhood.

So, little wonder that kids, young and old, are fast in the thrall of these new and miraculous electronic devices. There can be no doubt but that they give a sense of power and personal magnitude. They proclaim the order of the day’s march.

The kids have high-jacked the technologies of their elders in order to realize the fondest of all the dreams of youth: that of side-stepping those same elders into their own new life.

The final utterance in King Lear is, “We that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.” Now, in my very old age, I can, all of a sudden, see why this moving line of Edgar’s is both right and wrong. The kids will never know what we know--except perhaps in sudden little insights from out of nowhere. True enough. But. I must believe that those same kids may be entering on quite a new world, opened to them by the great E technology where I can never fully play. I think I must be resigned and keep out of the way.

In a sense, a sense at once melancholy and thrilling, our children will never come home again. And I say nothing about those terrific Rings which always, in the end, lead to cataclysm. Or maybe to a new Egypt. A new Middle East.

2011-02-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

Be Advised

I had accumulated five hunting stories that I wanted to tell, but had not, because they each contain a peculiar, and personal violence apart from ordinary hunting. But they finally got the best of me, and I invented a third gazette, after The Boulderceek Angler and its twin The Bouldercreek Actor. The third was to be, as you might have guessed, The Bouldercreek Hunter. I sent out four stories in four paper editions of this new gazette.

Now, I am unable to hold back on the fifth story. All of them had been as near truth as I could get them, but this last one, the one here posted on this obscure blog, is not a tale of killing
deer, antelope, ducks, pheasants, or grouse. It is the tale of killing a Man.

Be advised.

In any case, this is the end of my hunting stories. I have no more. It’s enough.

From

The Bouldercreek Hunter

Hunting Story Number Five

The Death of Ken John

1925-1982

Occasional Verses

2011-02-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

A Eulogy

On Saturday, January 22, 2011

In the Key of flat/foot

Sad old Saturday newspaper,

The Camera all about itself,

An exercise in public mourning,

A cultural draw-down.

Our dear old Camera,

The jewel in the town,
Local, independent, complete.

A real genuine American newspaper

Daily at my door,

The record of my Boulder life.

Out to the Eastern wastes it flies,

Lost and forgotten out there

In trash offices in trash buildings

Not even space for its morgue--

Its library-- that holds all Boulder.

A computer or two now will do.

No pressmen left down town,

Inked and grumbling about reporters,

No reporters prowling the town.

Now a clutch of stalled young people

Waiting for stories.

Poking at their resumes.

Hoping for escape

To a patch site at AOL

On which to grow a career.

Bred, as they have been

On the soured milk of social indecency

Ignorance, violence, and greed,

They write it down,

Spice it with banalities,

Never too banal, of

Flat-footed local stuff like that.

Get the paper out of town!

Those kids taking down

The Sign of the Camera,

To haul away-- to somewhere.

Some day, odds on, to become

A single sheet inserted weekly in the Post.

The NEW CAMERA,

Claiming a bright new day of

Public service--meaning corporate profit.

Dear old, poor old, sad old Saturday paper.

At The Club: an Over-Seas Member

2011-01-10T14:11:00.000-08:00

                                     Braving it out at The Flyfishers'Club.
                                                           69 Brook Street, London,
                                                  October 2019.

Transcription of a Paper Letter from One Old Fisherman to Another

2011-01-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

Dear Richard,

Yup, I agree. There is so much out there to make us feel bad, such a variety of things, so much that we cannot change. I guess that we must resort to a holding action; that is, trying hard to keep as cheerful as we can in the face of it all. Which is to say that we must not let the bastards get us.

One day last week, two new “fishing magazines” came in the mail. I sat down with them only to end up tossing them away in deep discouragement. It felt to me like our fishing’s gone to the dogs.

We’re bombarded in every field sports publication by the many and frantic efforts to get kids out there fishing, to teach them, convert them, instruct them even in their school rooms. The movement has gone evangelical, impassioned, and frantic.

My hunch is that it’s all in vain, that these newer generations will never fish as we have fished, let alone think of fishing as we have thought of it. The new “tackle” clutched in their hands will not be a fly rod, but a blackberry or an iPhone. That kid, standing there on the corner is receiving or sending another text, not dreaming of a way to get out and catch a trout.

Still the hue and cry is to get those damned kids out of the malls and away from their devices and out fishing-- if not for their own good, then for the good their names, added to the rosters and the polls, can do in the ongoing politics of sport-- but even more, for the greater good of corporate profit.

I think the battle is lost.

I think the effort to convert kids is at root disingenuous. Our motives are impure. At the deepest level what we want is to recruit kids to support the “industry” of angling: the manufacturers, the shops, the guides. Already the “industry” is slipping downward on the graphs of our tough times. We look with dismay at that kid walking the mall who carries the entire world electronically in his hand. He angles the world at will and almost for free. We old-time anglers simply can’t compete and can only stand by and wish we could yank that cell phone from his hand. We want him to memorialize that “barefoot boy with cheek of tan”,* with a cane pole and can of worms sauntering down an old dirt road to the old fishing hole. But that kid is gone forever-- as are his country parents. There is no rural America left where a kid can discover the field sports in his own sweet way.

We have to realize, I think, that for the first time, perhaps, in the history of human culture, kids do not much want to live the life that their parents lived. You and I may have had our spates of rebellion and wanted things different from our old folks, but their way remained the same safe way of life that we knew and wanted for ourselves. We lived within continuity and tradition.

Not that these kids today know what it is they want instead of what they have, but it clearly seems not to be the model that their parents represent. Going fishing with Dad hasn’t the appeal that it once had. Other social constituencies have come to understand this, but not the angling community in which thinking about social issues has never been a long suit. The capitalization and incorporation of youth as an important market looks to be total, with the field sports bringing up the rear

When we were kids, we lived closer to what we could see was the source of our daily bread. We understood what our dads did for a living to support us. And we tended to respect it. If Dad fished, it must be a good thing: such was the dynamic of our culture.

But not any more. So little is actually manufactured, so much is only computed in obscure offices that our lives have tended to become abstracted from a productive, work-a-day substantial reality. We become digital in our satisfactions and leave the rest to China.

And, as if this were not enough, demographics are running against all the field sports; ethnicities on the rise are not those where commonly a tradition of field sports is honored let alone practiced. I fear that we are in the late days of our angling tradition.

I am, neverthless, yours,

Gordon

* John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Barefoot Boy” (1885) defined and immortalized this fundamental American symbol.

in the collection of Mrs. Claude Albrighton of Boulder, Colorado

An Epistolary Essay in Defense of Sorrow

2010-12-13T13:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Professor of Chemistry and Distinguished Physician,
Dear Claude and John, I feel I must babble some sort of response to your recent concern for me, your devoted old friend who poses as a critic of whatever crosses his mind. We must be off on a stroll, three old “doctors,” hand in hand, talking of many things. Which of you is the Walrus and which the Carpenter I must leave you to decide, but I am stuck in the formula as the simple old oyster: ready to comment on your shoes and ships and sealing wax… nothing on your cabbages and only a touch or two on a king.
Is it possible to write to you as in a letter like this and make it do double-duty as a column to blog on The Bouldercreek Angler? We shall see.
Read more »

IN MEMORIUM

2010-12-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

Upon the Sudden Death in the Night

on a Road near Saratoga, Wyoming
on September 3, 2010

Adrian Bantjes

Distinguished

Professor of History

And Historian of Angling

The University of Wyoming

He who learns must suffer.

And even in our sleep,

pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

and in our despair, against our will,

comes wisdom to us

by the awful grace of god.

Aeschylus

Agamemnon l.179ff

Edith Hamilton, translator

He was my friend and colleague

A Critique of American Fly Fishing in Two Parts

2010-11-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

PART I

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning, in colonial America, in that agrarian, rural community, where fauna were still in balance with flora and both reconciled to the vagaries of local geologies and climates, there had to have been an idyllic landscape that offered those early Americans a marvelous promise of fish and game-- of both sport and provender.

The good and beautiful earth lay at almost every doorstep, easier for those early folks to enter upon than for us today to drive down town.

And that is what has become of us. We are all down town in the center of things most all the time and doing quite nicely, thank you.

But, back then, in that once upon a time, fishing was close to home, by foot or by horseback, and intimately connected to the household economy. And it was free.

A new politics and a new economy in a new land appeared to promise that freedom of access and supply of nature’s bounty in perpetuity. There was no need to hurry and so the technology of the field sports developed but slowly. A solid wood fishing rod with a fixed horsehair line was more than adequate; and two open barrels, side by side with hammer locks, did nicely on bird or beast.

Once upon a time, in order to enjoy, have success, and advance in the sport, fishermen went fishing close to home, usually for a few hours only. They went casually, and at little expense. A journey to a remote camp in the woods was a considerable undertaking and rare.

Today, our angler regularly finds himself in the air or for days on the road, on the way to distant, often exotic territories to find the same satisfactions, and accomplishment he used to get at home-- now with a new sense of urgency if not anxiety.

Urbanization is the great villain and moving force fueling this shift. The city has drawn our anglers into its service and some might say “bondage”. It has forced “nature” and its pleasures farther and farther a-field and kept us in our offices. Kept us starved for fishing.

So, what have we done? In our hours off, we have joined clubs, certainly Trout Unlimited. We have read the magazines and doted on the videos, in those hours stolen from the urban machine. A bit of “virtual” angling must often suffice.

Then comes what once was called “vacation”, today more flexible, less formal than the locked-in conventional two weeks of Julys-past when there were no cell phones or texting, to keep the job vibrating or ringing in our pockets. In any case, there still is time to get away and fish. Half an hour on the computer sets us up with destination and transportation. And off we go to a week in Alaska, or, as I do in my dreams, off to The Rio Grande in Patagonia. We pretty much bet our fishing season on those few days away.

Where in the past, fishing was more relaxed and easy- going, now it is marked by a sense of urgency. Angling success becomes urgently necessary in a new, less forgiving, way.

The dark side of all this is to increase the expense of it. The fishing is no longer free: it costs. Sometimes a lot. The water is likely to be private and privileged as once it was for an aristocratically wealthy few. The rest of us have always had to depend on free and public waters. We have been the undecorated anglers who en masse have paid the bill and kept the sport alive.

This en masse, we, the anglers of the working day, since the burst in popularity of fly fishing in the mid 1980s, have enjoyed more disposable income for recreation and developed keen interest in issues of the environment. And today we are wetting our waders in the finest rivers and lakes in the world, right along with our aristocratically wealthy betters of the older tradition.

And so our fishing has been transformed in our time. It has been driven by an historic irony that what we have always loved, we could readily get at home, we now chase quite cheerfully half way round the world to find it.

Nor do we do it alone. The adventure to new and uncharted fishing, with the least possible chance of failure, requires help. And so here comes a key factor in the revolution that has overtaken our angling: The Guide.

PART II

AND THEN THERE WAS THE GUIDE

The meteoric rise of the Guide finds us caught in another vexing irony: that now it requires two people to catch any given trout-- where once we did it alone, by ourselves, and solitary. Now we do it in the company of an assistant, an instructor, a protector, caterer, and a boss.

The angler who at one time we looked upon as a self-sufficient, internal sort of person, we now find transformed into a pupil, dependent upon a guide for instruction, landing his fish, selecting his flies, providing safety, lunch, and the conventional conversation of the facilitator, of one who is paid to be always encouraging. His conversation becomes a lingua franca-- or guide-talk.

Guides are an interesting lot. They are more often than not, superior young men and women, smart and capable of deep feeling, even delicacy of feeling. But, their conversation in the service of their profession, made of current slang, and excessive effusion, grows automatic and repetitive,They feel they must keep the client’s spirits buoyed up at all costs. It’s guide-talk talking.

Guides are often young men and women who have chucked the values of the middle class, what they call the “rat race”, and are content to live quite simply, on not much of a yearly income-- just as long as they can be allowed to fish! Fish a lot.

They may have had a bit of college, but not enough to spoil their innocense. Instead they tie the finest flies the world has ever seen, cast the farthest, and achieve supremacy in every one of the delicacies that attend on angling skill and gear.

They live the life that the rest of us dare not. But they depend upon us for alms. Their culture-hero is that unhappy man Thoreau in his shack by Walden Pond. Their ideology is an uncritical devotion to Catch and Release. All of them were born under the star of Trout Unlimited. They tend to agree with each other on most every issue and so tend to sound alike, think alike, and dress alike-- always on the youthful side of maturity.

As an occupational class, they tend to identify first with the owners of the water, then the fly shops, and lastly with the fish. The fee-paying client becomes their necessary suppliant.

Out on the water, the guide becomes the one who “knows” and therefore is the one who “decides”-- and later, back in camp, it is the guide who most vividly establishes the narrative of the day and reports on it. His narrative will often be exploited as an advertisement for his boss, the owner.

The guide’s reports are devoured by angling media and become an extension of it. This becomes the stuff on which the virtual angler feeds. He becomes a consumer of a product as commercial as any other. The client is voracious, always wanting more of the same and always something new. He pays and so must be fed.

Sport has indeed become an industry, business.

In the end, it is the language of angling that suffers. The distinguished literature of angling takes a drubbing as it becomes amorphous, repetitive, and commercial.

What is lacking is big personality and a clear voice. Before this contemporary rise in the popularity of angling and all the attendant writing about it, it was not difficult to tell the difference between the writing of giants like Ted Trueblood and Ray Bergman. Both wrote about the same subject, but with a nuanced tracing of personality, imagination, and sensibility that is the hallmark that separates literature from mere word-grubbing. I believe it fair to conclude that the guides as a professional class have absconded with the literature of angling and have made it their own. Our language has been made to pay.

~~~

At a book signing, once, I heard John Gierach say that for him it was the writing that came first and was most important. Then came the fish and the fishing. Such is the primal way: first an irresistible need and craving to speak and only then to cast about for a congenial subject matter-- like angling. Were I not writing this essay about fishing, I would surely he haranguing you about something else.

A Test Blog with a Piscatorial Musing

2010-11-12T08:09:00.001-08:00

If you are a subscriber to my blog, I wonder if you received an email alerting you to this trial posting…. In other words, is the system working for you?

In order that this posting not be altogether without substance, let me report that recently I over-heard Piscator saying to Venator:

“Contemporary fly tying is ingenious to a fault and superbly skilled: in these respects it has never been equaled. But the new generation of flies,” he said, “are rarely beautiful-- in the old, aesthetic and traditional way of flies.” He went on to say that there can be no doubt but that the new flies are more effective in the water than the older, now antique dressings. But, he sees the new flies as a drab and faintly melancholy spectacle with even duller names. Few if any would he want to rush home to duplicate. He would have to look long and hard to find that rare one, which might be for him like the poet Yeats’s yellow-haired girl whom only God could love for herself alone and not her yellow hair.

Male and Female Created He Them

2010-10-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

Hamlet and Lisbeth

Caveat

Whether or not you have read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you know the character, the man. Hamlet lives in our blood stream. We have all, in one way or another had to cope with his disruptions of our lives. We can’t avoid him; he’s everywhere. He has been elemental on the Periodic Table of our thought since Shakespeare discovered him. Now we have discovered his shadow, Lisbeth.

You may or may not have read the sensational three Swedish novels about crime and attendant horrors by the late Stieg Larsson and so may want to dodge this diatribe in which I propose to compare and contrast Hamlet with Larsson’s main character, Lisbeth Salander. To know one is, I think, to know the other.

Like Hamlet, Lisbeth, is also out there among us. Be warned.

As in electricity, there is no value assessment attributed to the factors, positive and negative, there should be no such values attributed to my suggestion that Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is the post-modern negative of the early-modern positive Hamlet. They are opposite sides of the same narrative coin. Hamlet came first on the waves of a new era: Lisbeth at the end of one, of what many feel are dark, angry days on the verge of socio-cultural recession. Both these powerful characters are structural markings of our literature and subject of our endless, if lurid, fascination-- and dreaming.

I should like to suggest a fist-full of comparative qualities that these two important figures of our imagination define. I wish to offer some bit of support for my free-swinging assertion.

~Hamlet and Lisbeth are preeminently models of the alienation of young people. One a prince, the other a nobody-- and both Nordic.

~Each is a kind of dream-life for the reader-- the same set of dreams over and over again.

~The dream of Hamlet is the old dream of the perfection of brilliant, clear youth and all its entitlements.

~The dream of Lisbeth Salander is also the old dream, the panic-dream of the dark, dangerous female side of things, the diamond-carbon brilliance of her funereal persona in a minimalist body-- and our frightened male’s attraction to it.

~ Both of these “moderns” are badly injured in their life-experience.

~ Both emerge from dangerous, unwholesome family circumstances.

~Each dreams of a father, a father who is playing havoc in their lives.

~Hamlet dreams of a great father who appears to demand his self-destruction.

~Salander dreams of a monster-father on the prowl to kill her.

~Both want to love and be loved, but they cannot trust in it.

~And so both become “ironists”. They see the world as a ghastly system of ironies.

~They are expert in their particular “modern” technologies: Hamlet in his revolutionary university ideas, Salander as a past-master of the computer and all its extra-legal resources.

~ Hamlet has “connections” outside Denmark at the university at Wittenberg; Lisbeth belongs to an international underground of powerful underworld hackers.

~Both are intellectuals on the razor’s edge of their times.

~Whatever else they are, both are brilliant.

~Both have a “global” consciousness and are at home nowhere. They are sojourners in the poisonous environments that they once called home.

~They know every thing that’s to be known. They know our secrets.

~ Each lives in emotional turmoil.

~Unimaginably terrible things dog their every step.

~Both are cruel and ready for any violence.

~Sexual violence is one of them.

~They are killers.

~They hate categorically, each in his/her own new way.

~They are solaced by their crimes.

~ By definition, they are vengeful. They prowl about looking for revenge.

~They feel that they are at the center of things and appointed “to set it right” with their rough justice.

~ The madness attributed to them becomes a real possibility. Madness as strategy, or therapy.

In the end, both Hamlet and Lisbeth Salander work a sort of salvation, a transformation of the horror of their circumstances. Hamlet will be “saved” and given new life by his narrative, the “story of Hamlet” that Horatio will live to tell to the ages. Salander will live on in her money, on her stiletto heels and under a blonde wig-- in the millions upon millions of kronor she has stolen from an exposed criminal corporate giant she has destroyed, now a suicide. It is a two-headed coin. Either way we win, with a good story or with the cash.

But night or day, big or little, they are much the same character. Too dangerous to mess with. How interesting it is that we are so drawn to them both and yet would find living with either of them unbearable.

A Wagnerism of Recent Note

2010-10-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

A report on the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s

Das Rheingold, simulcast in high definition to the Cinemark Theatre

at Boulder,Colorado on 10/10/10--
by Gordon M. Wickstrom who…

who has lived his life under the spell of this music and this drama, who has collected this stuff throughout the history of his imagination, and has lived to see this day.

I was more than moved by what I experienced. I was shaken. I am not one to encourage crying: I leave that to television’s evening news. But this production came as close as I want to come to tears-- of joy.

That great ending, when the gods cross over into Valhalla over the rainbow bridge, the staging of which failed to work on opening night last month (9/27), worked flawlessly yesterday afternoon. I think I have never witnessed a finer effect on any stage anywhere. One could only gasp at the daring and the magic of it. My wife grabbed at me.

The dangerous mechanics of that wondrous setting: it was not an environment in the ordinary sense of stage scenery, but a machine for acting. It was a machine for our time.

And there was James Levine getting that great and glorious sound out of that great orchestra, and he grown so frail and physically diminished by his recent surgeries! And those singers, busting a gut, for us, risking everything on that next note, that next phrase, coming at us straight on! One might call the afternoon a perfect riot of superb bass and base-baritone singing, all those accomplished men pouring it out. I have heard many of the great German Alberichs and have admired them immensely. But this American guy, Eric Owens, was phenomenally effective and persuasive.

I put that word “guy” in italics because that’s what these people were, all regular “guys” for the working day, on a big job of work. Singing Wagner with what feels to me an American clarity and directness. It made me flush with pride. No “Bayreuth barking” here.

And as if this were not enough, we have a new Wotan on our hands, to rival the international master of the role, James Morris, who must all too soon pass it on to the likes of this young Welshman, Bryn Terfel.

It has always seemed to me that, after the brilliant orchestral introduction to the opera, the action opens only to drag on too long with the Rheinmaidens (or “dotters”) teasing poor Alberich about what must be his erection, hidden in that costume, and then about the gold itself. But not yesterday, not with these three Rheinmaidens, who were captivating, clever, intelligent and, again, with what I want to call that American clarity, vitality, and precision of voice-- and high spirits.

In fact, I want to say that there was a peculiar high spiritedness throughout the production, a certain “lift” and lightness of heart amid the most dire of existential circumstances. Call it “tragic joy”.

I will never admit and always deny it, but I suspect that it is the very technology of this satellite performance that must contribute hugely to this extraordinary accomplishment.

This mode of performance, electronic as it may be, manifests a new kind of audience, one readier for the intimacies of acting and singing, an audience who is let in on the secrets of production,

I have always argued for the traditional decorums of performance. I have resisted the contemporary urge to demystify art. I have wanted to preserve, especially in the opera, its glamour, its ceremony, its privileges, and secrets. But I give up. I realize now that I have lived to experience the secularization, the improvisation, the democratization of the opera. I am now all too glad to be let in on the secrets, to see back stage, and to see what I knew all along, that it was not a mystery after all, but hard, hard work accomplished with an efficiency and dedication that is breath-taking.

I understand now what made the traditional ceremony of opera possible. It was hard-working men and women, all the technical staff and support people, all the singers, even those acrobats who doubled the singers in Rheingold.

If the Met radio broadcasts, beginning in 1940, were the start of this secularization, it must be these HD transmissions to movie theatres everywhere that are accomplishing this cultural transformation. (There are those who feel that these transmissions take a toll on the production’s effectiveness in the theatre. One major reviewer suggests that the production was cast with lighter, inadequate voices in order to record them “easier”. )

In any case, I am awed with admiration for those hundreds of men and women who worked at such a high level of accomplishment, all of it entirely “hand made”, depending on those theatre workers doing their jobs faithfully and precisely. I get so proud of it that I want to burst. I feel personally involved with them and what they are doing-- and don’t forget: it’s IN REAL TIME, at the instant that I’m watching them. Just think! And then wipe the dazzle from your eyes.

This Rheingold reminds us of the meaning of work, of making something by hand, and for the first time, and knowing that it will have a continuing life in a community as a proclamation of its profoundest values.

At the curtain-call, as those singers came forward to take their bows, there was gaiety on that stage, a sign of the oneness of performer and audience, of their having been somewhere together that afternoon, where their shared humanity reached its fullness-- in spite of everything. These best of workers for the working day had achieved something greater than any one of them, something in the total service of music and theatre that ennobles us all. Then, after their bows and getting out of costume, they could go out for a good dinner.

Before this, back in the 80s, I had a seat in the house in New York for the complete Ring Cycle, the Otto Schenk ravishing “naturalistic” cycle. Levine was there, back then, working the pit, making music, and making me hold my breath with that exaltation peculiar to Wagnerites. Sometimes we are chided for our enthusiasm. But, look what we got yesterday: we got this stunning electronic transmission of Das Rheingold to our own local movie palace, live! It was not the old and dear ceremony of opera, but something else, not a substitute for the “real thing”, but a new thing in art and life. I, for one, welcome it.

ADDENDUM

This production was haunted. A spook out of the Met’s Golden Age haunted the stage as Froh, and calling himself Adam Diegel . But we know better: this guy is actually the re-incarnation of the youthful Lauritz Melchior, whom, I bet, we will one day soon hear as Siegfried himself, when he will remove the breast-plate of the sleeping Brunhilde and sing out in consternation, maybe the funniest line in all opera, “Das ist kein Mench!”

Walking North with Walton

2010-09-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

Driving the Peloponnese in Greece some years ago, through the countryside of Arcadia-- where myth and tradition locate the Golden Age of pastoral perfection-- I looked everywhere for an Arkadian landscape where shepherds and shepherdesses might tend their flocks under endlessly blue skies, in endless leisure, along crystal brooks, singing their songs of love and peace, with strife and greed unknown, and every need effortlessly satisfied. But I could not find it.

More recently, turning back to Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, I thought again of his miles-long walk north out of London to Tottenham and on toward Ware along his beloved River Lea to fish the lovely spotted brown trout and possibly share the day with an agreeable companion. When I think how that great old royalist man of letters and affairs urges me, his reader, to take up my bed and walk out to a country-side of lovely little rivers, gentle fields, intimate village inns, and charming country folk, removed from every anxiety, greed, and resentment; when I understand that he offers me that perfection of the rural life in contrast to the system he so vehemently opposes: the monstrosity of London's mercantilism-- to which he was himself a hardware merchant in Fleet Street-- I just cannot do it.

In our terrible times, invited as we are to every tea party, we can’t but see the world through a different system of lenses from those of the pastoral. We think we see more clearly, if bitterly, and are disabused of Arcadian and Waltonian idealisms.

Thing is, I suspect that the poets of Arcadian perfection from Virgil to Walton himself knew well enough that the pastoral ideal of Greek myth and of rural Old England were just that: ideals only. But, then, an ideal is never only an ideal.

Ideals have life and energy of their own. They can live powerfully inside us. They can cause us to try to live in certain ways.

If Izaak Walton's ideal or idea of pastoral angling on the Lea or on the Dove in Derbyshire never quite existed, it surely lived inside his head and heart as it can do in ours -- if we can get it there.

How do we get it? I've not seen it for sale in any fly shop. We may, however, be able to catch it, like a virus, from another angler who has it, as that fellow Venator caught it from Walton himself in the Compleat Angler. Or maybe it will rub off from its archetypal memory in art of all kinds. Maybe we are smart enough to invent it for ourselves out of the combination of deep memory and experience. Perhaps we can dream it.

This idea, once locked in, completes us as angler-- the compleat angler whom Walton called “contemplative.” After we have acquired every item of tackle, every angling skill imaginable, this idea, this ideal, calls us to try to live without greed and avarice, or morbid striving-- a life in harmony with the ideal landscape of the stream itself. A place to be quiet and grateful-- and as Walton added, to “go a-angling,” and "study to be quiet."

If this ideal were just that, only an ideal, a literary construct from the imaginatively engaged Walton, if it never did and never will precisely exist, if there are no landscapes of that perfection, if it was all a matter of Walton's all-creating artistic and social dreaming, it was for him, nevertheless, an instrument of his moral and psychological salvation. How terribly urgent, then, it must it be for us now, in our awful predicament, to imagine that ideal as powerfully as we can, and act it out. We need rescue of some sort.

GUNS

2010-08-14T11:32:00.001-07:00

I Sing of Arms and the Man

Virgil, The Aeneid

My daughters grew up upon the assumption of guns in the house. They had eaten more wild meat than maybe any school teacher’s kids should have to. And they grew up to want to fire their father’s guns-- and their children too-- in order to know what it’s like and how to be safe with them.

Now, here comes one of them back from scouting theatres in Palestine and Israel appalled, if not exactly frightened, by the armament she had to face and walk through everywhere. And so now she turns the tables on me and asks something like, “So what do you think of guns now!?

I let the question pass, held my peace, until now when I can think about what I think of guns.

First of all, I like guns. Good guns are beautiful, their mechanisms highly satisfying to operate. I like the smell, the heft, the sound, and the care they require. I like that sense of reaching out so precisely and far with bullet or shot. I own only two guns but want more; for instance, a pistol. But I could never afford guns and fine fishing tackle both. You surmise how I chose.

And I should admit right up front that I was never a good shot; in fact, it has been a long-running joke among my hunting companions-- and my wife-- that I was apt to stumble-bum along and miss even easy shots.

But I loved it. Everything about it, even the grief and admiration for the creature I killed. I loved the ceremony of it all. And I have admired the splendid skills that the expert brings to his shooting bench. But it is essential to add that gun and hunting culture has been on a steady decline toward decadence and sheer violence, some of which is, I’m certain, a price we pay for our militarism. I despise it.

But, I hold myself to be still under oath to kill enemy people in defense of my nation. I swore that oath, long ago and no one has ever released me from it. So, I am ready to kill people in that defense yet today. I kill, and that is the problem.

In this matter of gun ownership and use, I don’t want to hear talk of the Second Amendment. I don’t give a damn about all that. Why, in something so fundamental to my experience, so essential to my self-definition, should I care what those Founders thought about guns! As though they ever agreed on much of anything anyway. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton; et al, yes, even old Washington, each had his own bundle of ideas. They often differed violently with each other and were ready to call each other the vilest of names-- but in the end they accomplished a monument of compromise, of give and take, of rational, enlightened intelligence, to settle on a Constitution that none of them much liked but thought might just work-- and it did. And it has, with cultivation, weeding, and enriching along the way of its history, worked wonders.

More than the product of their compromise, it is the process of it and the Founders ability to co-operate that should inspire us today. We must envy their education and their discipline and come to a compromise on what to do about guns in our society.

Rather than doting on the Second Amendment we ought to consider who we are, what we are, we who own and bear arms. The answer lies in anthropology and genetics, not in judicial definitions and decisions. It is not a matter of what a person is allowed to do, but of what a person does, and must have done in the earliest experience of his humanity-- as he stumbled out of Africa carrying fire, flint, and spear.

I believe that my native human condition is intimately involved with weapons and is genetic.

I am taken with projectiles of all sorts: bullets, shot, arrows, spears, rocks, apples, fly lines, foot balls, snow balls and base balls-- you name it. And with their systems of delivery, even a water pistol, potato gun, and my favorite sling shot. As a human being, I have been in love with projecting projectiles. How elegant and beautiful they can be! They can be joyful.

As a human being, in my genes, I have taken up arms to satisfy my family’s hunger, as well as against the common enemies of man. And I have seen them transmuted into sport and the matter of art.

Sing, Arms and the Man!

Shall we, then, lose our right to bear arms? I think not: bearing them lies too deep in our nature ever to be cut out by any legal or legislative action. But, at the same time, we know and understand that something must be done about all these guns. There are simply too many of them in the hands of exploding populations. Too many of us are too poor and broken. Too many are crippled in family life, soused in TV horror, and these random, presidential wars. We are full of the hatreds of race.

There are simply too many guns of the wrong kind among us to stand the strains of our society. They are too easily got, too cheaply bought in the free market we so espouse. Many of them are technically advanced far beyond the needs of ordinary killing-- ugly, brutalist things, good only for murder. Who would want an AK47? --these weapons that have so degenerated into a monstrous companionship with drugs and their international, criminal traffic!

The more I write, the farther I feel from the Founders, and Amendment #2.

Still, I feel at home in the often shocking violence in literary and dramatic art. I believe knowledge of it to be indispensable to a full human life. I think of Virgil’s Aeneas carrying his father on his back, away from the destruction of Troy. I think of my fingers in Gloucester’s bleeding eye sockets. Or the hands in the current film, Winter’s Bone.

At the same time I remember those old folks of mine, killing their way out of Africa, but marking their passage with the graves of their dead, left behind with ever more ceremony, until the ceremony of death became the sublimity of art.

And so, faithful to them and given who we are, I am not willing, in these latter days, to renounce that legacy of arms in the name of any popular, soft-edged sentimentalism. After all, it is the epigraphical violence of our species, recorded in art, with which I have honed my mind and which in the end, defines and comforts me:

a killer, bearing arms, not by law, but by nature.

I am utterly opposed to any effort to disarm me. I’m dead set against any court’s attempt to denature the human being in this way. But I am ready to be reach compromise-- as did the Founders-- and be controlled in my ownership and use of those arms. Just how, I don’t know. I leave it to younger, more flexible minds.

But, if I am by definition an armed killer, something must be done. I want us to proceed to discussion and debate based on a right definition of what the human animal is-- and in a merciful spirit and clean politics.

How is my killing properly and humanely to be constrained? I’m ready to talk-- but not with judges and lawyers in the room, talking Constitutional law at me. I want us to think of our old folks who walked day by day after day out of Africa, improvising their growing humanity, day by day, hoping one day to live safely and at peace, a time to turn their arms to sport and their killing to art.

Last Night, July 30, at Chautauqua

2010-07-31T13:38:00.000-07:00

Something happened up at Chautauqua last night.

There was a break-through-- under all that magnificent timbering. I thought I heard a new orchestra and a new music.

It seemed to me a break-through into a maturity and authority and capacity for greatness that I have not fully experienced before, and it was for Wagner’s Tristan and Ring with soprano Jane Eaglen, Of course, it might just have been me and my enthusiasm for this music. I was loaded for bear, I admit. But, for me this was one of the finest moments among all the fine moments I have known in Boulder, since I was first taken to Chautauqua, new-born, back in ‘26.

Conductor Michael Christie, was out of the body as he built, phrased, and defined that great music. He was beautiful in ways he could not himself know, unable, like us, to see himself at work. His ability to sustain himself and his orchestra in so huge a work is remarkable. He is an authorized Wagnerian now-- and one of note.

Like many others, I went worrying about Jane Eaglen and her Isolde and Brunhilde. But I ought not to have. She was grand, thrilling, in generous control of the music, the hall, and us in the audience. It was fine to see her looking superb and to hear her. Those big moments that she and Christie built up out of the orchestra and her heroic voice knocked me right up out of my seat.

I have always wanted to be, in Bernard Shaw’s phrase, “the Perfect Wagnerite”. And last night I came to my Wagner and heard him fresh, true, immensely powerful and intelligent-- almost with the thrill of that first time so long ago when I heard Flagstad and Melchior with Toscanini beating time.

And to think we otherwise might not have this magnificent thing, this orchestra, but for the great old Chautauqua hall standing there since 1898, a hall of such acoustic and architectural perfection. Just think! And but for the enlightened vision of the City of Boulder it might have been “scraped off” and we not have this superb Wagnerian orchestra.

So, I have to tell you that it was some evening of concert-going last night! And now the season must end come Friday with Mahler’s Fifth.

Come one, come all! I know the best seat in the house, but I’m not telling.

That Medallion, there

2010-07-25T09:30:00.001-07:00

    There’s that medallion, that logo, that trade-mark, to our left, alongside this article. My esteemed editor, Bob Wells, at Boulder Reporter, stuck it there. I worry that it might puzzle you; so let me explain.
    Three years ago I began to feel that, in order to go on writing this stuff with any semblance of authority and then send it out all over the known world, as a sort of amateur, faux company producing texts of various sorts, I would need a “sign”, a logo by which to be identified. So, with a light heart, I set out to invent one.
    The first element to suggest itself was that fly-- I had tied it and my friend and designer Michael Signorella scanned it nicely. Not just any fly, but a Wickham’s Fancy, a famed dressing devised by the distinguished Dr.T.C. Wickham, an early member of London’s Flyfishers’ Club, who had established the first syndicate of anglers on the famous River Test at Houghton in 1875.
    A Wickham’s Fancy was the first fly that, as a school boy at Winchester College, the pre-eminent G.E.M. Skues bought for himself. I had even gone so far as to plant an imaginary Dr. Wickham, frail and failing , in the last year of his life, in the audience of my THE GREAT DEBATE between Skues and Halford. I wanted proper recognition for the good doctor, to welcome him as a presiding spirit over my entire enterprise. That contest, as I imagined it, over the wet vs. the dry fly took place, in my invention, at The Flyfishers’ Club, 98 years ago. We produced it here in the recital hall of Boulder’s public library in 2006.
    This sprightly fly, with ginger hackle palmered over a gold tinsel body, was originally thought of as a dry fly, but has come down to us on this side of the Atlantic as a standard wet fly. In any case, it is an emblem of a great period in British and American fly fishing-- a fly of the old school, once found in every fly book, now nearly forgotten.
    Next, I have always felt that angling is all of a piece, whether it is with a dry fly or a worm in Boulder Creek, an Eskimo hole in arctic ice, an open boat on the North Sea, Atlantic salmon in Russia, or Indians spearing fish in the Amazon. Nor would I want to forget the women and children who have anxiously waited, since time began, for the return of their fisher-men from dangerous seas. And I include the fishwives endlessly processing the catch at dock-side. I include them all. All in it together.
    Fishing is fishing. It is a whole.
    And it is certainly ancient.
I like to think of anglers as a community of action and thought, a company in the spirit of medieval guilds, where men of like profession bound themselves together in a brotherhood in order to advance in technology, commerce, and fellowship. The trades they professed in common often identified them with the workmen of the Scriptures; and, in this case of fishermen, with Saint Peter himself.
    And so I had a name, a mystique, and a title:
                     The Whole and Ancient Company of Anglers.

   I believed in it and was in business. Then, Signorella designed it into this magic circle of a sign with the hook at the center, sharply barbed, not de-barbed to impotence in the popular modern manner. In any system of symbols, the hook is surely a potent, simple, and ancient member. It is a beautiful object in its own right.
    Here it is as the epigraph to my second book, Late in an Angler’s Life:

Every Where in Every Time

There Work

The Whole and Ancient Company of Anglers,

The Order of the Desperate,

Who Let Down Nets and Lines to Fish,

From the Bottom to the Top

From the Beginning to the End

Let Me Be Counted in That Number!

With a logo and a motto, I felt justified to broadcast my gazette to the public. It has stubbornly resisted dealing exclusively with fishing, and has insisted on slipping off into all the heart-breaking stuff of which my life-- and I assume that of my readers-- is made.
So, there you have it: there’s that medallion.

KING LEAR TONIGHT

2010-07-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

Tonight I shall attend a performance of King Lear. I shall see it for the manyeth time-- of a life-time of teaching it, worrying about it, and acting the damned old king three times. Probably the greatest of all plays. Staged once again at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

Tonight I shall attend an opening night ceremony of food and drink. There will be the customary speeches thanking almost everyone-- except actors and acting, Amid the polite applause, I’ll be off somewhere in reveries of my own King Lear. I’ve appeared in it twice in this very CU Mary Rippon Theatre. First, in my nonage as Kent. Many years later as the king himself-- and nearly as tormented an actor as He a king.

Tonight the title role will be taken by an excellent professional actor of middle years who is bound to turn in a workman-like performance through which I shall try not to fiddle experimentally with my hearing aids; but why bother at all as I shall reflexively lip the words right along with the actors-- I am that perilously close to knowing the play by heart.

Ah! those words! To have been allowed to speak them in pubic! The immense privilege of it!

What will that actor, the poor devil, do with that first line of his tonight? “Attend the Lords of France and Burgundy, Gloster”. It’s a life and death decision that the actor must make; because all that is to come depends on how he reads that short first short, throw-away line. There can be no going back. It will determine what kind of man this Lear is. For better or worse.

And then, some three hours later, it will determine his death. Actors never get a second chance once the curtain is up. But, and I rejoice in this, at the end, by bringing the curtain down, amid audience applause, the miracle of the theatre takes place: the “dead” actor rises up to take his bow and live to act another day! It is the resurrection of the body and glorious.

My fantasy is that something will go terribly wrong with Lear’s performance tonight and I will be hauled up out of the audience, a script thrust into my hand with orders to get on with it, on with the play. But I’m now just too old to be out there doing that sort of thing, playing “His” play, seeking redemption from “His” folly, “His” madness, “His” love, Why can’t that crazy old man take care of himself? I’ve got enough trouble of my own. I wonder that Shakespeare should have written such a play in which the protagonist is too old to play in his own play! It’s like living through your own funeral.

Three Lears: 1975, 1979, 1995.

The first was probably best, the most vivid and true. The last probably the most significant by virtue of its being a break-through in the whole process of producing Shakespeare. The middle one, here in Mary Rippon, was a painful flop for me. An obdurately misguided director who would suggest to his cast that the death of John Wayne was a fitting way for us to understand Lear’s tragedy-- to me who daily, hourly, waited every rehearsal for word of my mother’s death who had struggled to breathe for ten years out of love for her children. John Wayne! Some ideas are sheerest shit.

So here I am, every bit as old, probably older than He at His “four score and upward”. I’m four score and a lot “upward”--old enough at last to have some direct sense of what is going on in this monstrous-magnificent play, but without the stamina to do anything about it. I’ll do well to sit through it tonight. I don’t think I want to go….

Tonight’s director says that, with her younger, vigorous actor, she will play down Lear’s old age. That is sure to be a comfort to an audience scared to death of old age anyway.

That long first scene of the play is in fact a one-act play in itself and plays like one. It completes its satisfactions in some twenty minutes. And again, so, long ago, I did it, did it for a one-act play festival competition. It carried the day and played like a house-afire-- those Wyoming high school kids!

Peter Brook speaks of Theatre Temperature, where suddenly, in spite of every possible drawback, every limitation, somehow the action catches fire and life is lived in all its terrible intensity on stage before our very eyes. Somehow those kids of mine raised the theatre temperature of the first scene of Lear to the flash point, altogether unaware of the impossibility, even the absurdity, of what they were trying to do. Nothing that happens tonight will match that for me.

So, three times I did it, and, like my own certain death, I feel I know nothing about His-- not for all my academic saying. I feel that I have not contributed anything much to the play, not moved very far beyond a very first reading, so long ago, when, over a long night in a cabin up on Sugarloaf Mountain, with a blizzard howling outside, Betty and I pulled the sofa up close to the fire and there, by its light, read the play together. Never was there a moment like that:

Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.

King Lear V, iii, 309.

I Say We Will Have No More Saluting

2010-06-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

                             Hamlet declared that we will have no more marriage, while I....

     I woke in the night, in ready-made anger, generated by a television news image left over from the earlier evening, an image of a bunch of nameless, faceless subalterns of government in suits, saluting in every direction along with a squalid squad of hapless, Pentagonic generals, of which there seems to be an endless supply to send out into the field, foreign and domestic, to fail relentlessly to do what they were charged to do.
     All that damned saluting, especially by those guys in business suits! Decorum is all shot to hell. Even in the darkest days of World War II, the Navy found time to teach us boots military decorum. We learned that only personnel in uniform saluted or were saluted. Out of doors, an officer, only if covered (wearing a hat), was to be saluted. Nor did one ever salute a civilian, for God’s sake. And I say, by extension, that those civilian operatives should keep their hands in their pockets if they can’t learn to stand properly at attention.
     These are the times that try men’s souls: wasn't that the way Tom Paine put it long ago? And isn’t it so now?
     Here we are with the most promising Presidency of our era crashing on the rocks of the worst batch of bad luck in memory-- and all to the gleeful spite of the worst of people in the body politic.
     Just think: a great and enlightened nation held helpless and hostage to the global empire of BP and its multiple oily billions. If in doubt, reread “Beowulf” about monsters in our depths. Think about those who would presume to do our thinking for us-- and sink us.
     I had thought that we were all set for something new in the affairs of men and women. I have been arguing that we are into a New Period in the history of American fly fishing and made my argument out of signs that I thought I saw of more humane intellectual, political, social, and economic forces rising around us. Now all that appears to be going down the drain, the more fool I.
     The bankers and would-be bankers have ruined everything. The American genius for business turns villainous. The stubborn darkness of the recession has given rise to political factionalism, in which the shrillest and ugliest strike out from the dark caves of ignorance, fear, and hate, and care for nothing beyond the accumulation and protection of private wealth-- guarding their golden hoard. Above all else, in the dynamics of human consciousness, they lust for the rawest sort of power and hate taxes most of all.
     They cry the Constitution as their authority for an America of the dark ages. This mindless shouting of The Constitution depends on their insistent ignorance of the document itself, the conditions of its origin, and its continued growth over our history.
     Taxes! Here I am, an eighty-five year old, retired school teacher, a veteran, now a scribbler of blogs. And I live in luxury! I am hard-pressed to think of a single thing that I treasure, enjoy, and am grateful for that does not eventually root itself from taxation. Taxation is the cost of our privilege and our luxury. Bring it on! say I.
     We should worry ourselves sick about American education. What do we make of ourselves as a nation, alone in the family of nations, where the operative principle of life, evolution , is held in doubt, more often in out-right rejection by so many.
     The religious right, hand in hand with poverty, stands in the way of proper education in the United States of America. Think how a state like Texas, in the body of its legislature, can determine what nonsense and error children are required to be taught. Think of how these legislators pander and pimp for their primitive religious literalisms of race, class, sex, and gender. Only in America!
    And those guys go on saluting, saluting, and ever more saluting. I wish the President would stop it. (At least there was comic relief when Bush saluted)
     What, after all, does a salute signify if not acceptance? And what should we be accepting today? BP? Bankers? Religionists? Tea Partiers? Moral and political scheisters of any stripe? Must we accept, acquiesce, in all this?
     In my youthful days in the Navy, I prided myself on the style of my salute. I did it right. I thought I knew what I was saluting as recognition of my right and proper responsibility as a citizen of this great nation. But that was another time-- long ago-- when our souls were tried to great and just purpose.
     I am troubled by these guys in their suits and am beginning to understand what young people today mean when they speak idiomatically of “a suit”, those identical, interchangeable operatives with their spread collars and Windsor knots. All black suits.
     I was raised to a careful standard of linen and cravat. I love neck ties and feel at my best only when wearing one. But what shall I do now, when that suit and tie, that perfectly knotted bit of the finest Italian silk, has come to suggest something quite other than it used to? What shall I do now?
     Shall I dress in the trash mode of the multitudes and become one of them? At my age! I need a New Style for this New Period that I keep plugging. That is, if there is to be any New Period.
     My soul is being tried. Out of uniform, as I am, I can salute no one and no thing. I have lived too long, a victim of my excellent physicians and their ministrations. I think I am living beyond my moral means…. Again, in a luxury that borders on the obscene given a world of such immense and pervasive suffering-- and the rampant resources for destruction of BP.
     While I despise the religionists and their silly “end times”, I have to wonder if I ought to just come down off my high-horse, quit looking for New Periods and just accept, salute, what might well be The End, finis, of all that I understand and has been given me… I suspect that there is not enough in Google to save us. And Mozart cannot last forever.
     Still, maybe there is something for me to salute after all. I am bound on my own special wheel, bound to the continued effort to try to encourage and assist young people. Young people distract me from my miseries of mind and heart and remind me once again of life and art. They inspire me simply by their being young. But for them, I should be in despair. I salute them-- at full attention.
                                                  L'envoi
     Is this the way to use the privilege of a blog? As a sort of antacid for a burning spirit? I had thought that my blogs ought to be a series of carefully wrought essays, written, revised, and rewritten. They ought to be on matters of common interest and concern with the reader-- a place where we might meet in mutual pleasure.
     Now here’s this piece, burning and indigestible. Shall I be forgiven ?

Sleepless in the Gulf

2010-06-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

Not poppy, nor mandragora,

Not all the drowsy syrups of the world

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou ow’dst yesterday. Othello, III,iii

    It will be years before the bosses at British Petroleum, its ancillaries like Halliburton, and the undesirables at Interior’s mineral management can once again sleep easily as once they did on that “yesterday”-- for which today they must so yearn. Courts will wrangle for years over what are “legitimate” claims and over personal responsibility for lost lives, livelihoods, homes, a way of life.      Some talk of indictments in the case of the eleven dead. Others keep pushing the long narrative of corporation neglect, malpractice, dishonesty, and profiteering coming forth from whistleblowers who were on the spot. And those wretches in the offices of MMS, where can they go now?
      No, there will be precious little “sweet sleep” for any of them in the face of charges for their malfeasance. They must toss and turn the nights away thinking how bitterly ironic it is that, had they only, many yesterdays ago, cooperated with and not fought off regulations and supervisions from federal authority, this thing might never have happened. The right-wing, single-minded as it is in its effort to “get” the President for anything and everything, is now crying out against the failure of government to fix the mess-- a “mess” that their opposition to regulation of corporate culture has brought down on all our heads.
     Surely it must be clear to some sober conservatives that government intervention into any emergency like this must move them closer to just what they most fear and now call European democratic socialism.
     Year by year, day by day, almost by the hour, the public is moving closer, in spite of protestations to the contrary, to acceptance of the need for greater governmental regulation of American business, industry and finance. Government is, after all, the means by which we save ourselves from ourselves.
     Surely there are thinkers on the Right who must realize how much bigger this disaster in the Gulf must now make the federal government? Don’t they hear the public demand for a bigger government intervention? At what point might public consciousness turn to the possibility of out-right public ownership of the oil industry for rescue from its product?
     And the industry has only itself to blame. It has fouled, quite literally, its own waters. Corporate capitalism, foreign and domestic, has taken a body blow and might never be the same again in the United States of America.
     Who among us would want to walk in the pajamas of the management of BP and face the miseries of those sleepless nights, imagining papers of indictment, writs of restitution, threats of corporate collapse, possibly even the loss of private millions?
                                                               ~~
      Where is the great man, jaunty with a cigarette and a martini-- or that plain, hard-boiled Missourian with a plain bourbon and water-- where is that man of whom I have dreamed to lead me through these late days of my life? Where is he who will raise holy hell, cleanse the temple, and restore the beauty of American life?
      Well, you can’t fool me: I know where he is. I want him to rise to the full height of his excellence and lay about, as it were, with the jaw-bone of an ass to call an end to this nightmare of corporate malfeasance. “Yesterday” is a lost cause. A livable tomorrow can still be cried in the streets.
                                                           ~~~~~

Two New Houses in the Neighborhood

2010-05-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

On this south side of Lover’s Hill, just down the street from us, on Mesa Drive, are two new houses, built into the hillside, side by side, with almost identical foot-prints. They are just finished and up for sale-- in the millions. And they are extra-ordinary, suggesting, as they do, almost the last gasp of classic modernism. One is in shades of carbon stucco, the other, of which I write, is a sunny tan or beige stucco. Like night and day, the one to the east is the agitated dark shadow of the other, beaming bright in the west.

Be assured that I like both the houses. They are wonderful works of art, each one justifying and pointing the other, sororial opposites, yet twins, each impossible to imagine one standing there without the other. As I drive and walk by their construction, they make me feel good. I admire their daring, their glass gaze out over Boulder, their powerful presence. I try to imagine living in one of them and am seduced.

The westerly beige house was entirely prefabricated in Germany, it's many parts shipped over to Houston and trucked in great containers up to Boulder. German technicians and builders came along to snap together the bits and pieces of its interlocking, complex and esoteric technology. And now it’s been opened to us neighbors-- with wine and good things to eat. I am taken with its Germanism-- its severe elegance: it’s like having a bit of Bauhaus on Mesa Drive.

Years ago I read an essay-- I forget where or in what-- in which the author suggested what might well be the origin of all architecture. In his anthropological imagination, early, wandering human-like ancestors of us all took refuge for the night, for their safety, under a rock large enough to cover them. The author referred to this little retreat under a roof of rock as a little aedicule, a little house. It was in point of structural fact a lintel roof propped up or supported by posts of more rock at the sides. This little aedicule, this little house, might have resembled one of the ancient dolmens on the western Irish landscape-- numinous, sacral structures that were the little houses of the dead.

Doubtless our wandering ancestors may have sometimes taken up longer residence in one of these little houses of post and lintel stone. They would have hauled stuff in with them, the necessities of their life. And, sure as you’re alive, they would have decorated some of that stuff and invented art itself.

Secure as they were from the elements and their enemies in their little aedicule, they could have been almost cozy and, in the leisure of their security, made something beautiful for the house.

Should you want to test this profound impulse to get inside, into a little aedicule, just ask a child playing house under a card-table. The child will show you these posts and lintels. There cannot be much of anything more persistent or basic to life than this compulsion to get a lintel overhead with two good lusty posts at the side for support of a little roof over head. One need only improvise a bit on this principle to build a proper room-- or house.

This need and its impulse must surely be genetic.

Of course, we well know how the architects of Antiquity took the post and lintel idea and made The Parthenon out of it-- and all the other glories of the Classical world. Nor are we independent of it today. We use it in a thousand ways and depend upon its security. When we come home, at day’s end, most of us are welcomed by a familiar doorway of post and lintel that we know so well and depend upon for both structural and spiritual support.

You may well wonder where all this aedicule business of post and lintel is getting us amid the pleasures of this German masterwork of domestic architecture. I want to argue that it is precisely the comforts, the snug, cozy security of a little aedicule that is missing from this structure.

Nowhere in this beige German house can I see and feel that intimacy of support of post and lintel. I see and admire the straight running elegant lines and sharply cut angles of everything. I admire the rule of reason and fine, clean design that I see everywhere around me. As I love geometry, I could love this house. But I cannot find any place to snuggle into, not even in the lovely glass enclosed bedroom. There must be posts and lintels in the structure somewhere, but they are hidden, masked in steel, aluminum and faux stone. Nowhere do I feel cozy and protected.

For the purposes of my argument, there are two kinds of houses. One is designed and built for the resident to furnish and define as an expression of her personality. These houses acquire character from the accumulation of décor, of stuff-- by the processes of addition.

Another kind, the kind we have here newly on Mesa Drive, is so rigorously designed, so militantly “finished” as to allow little or no contribution from the resident, little or no identification with his imagination. Architectural purity is maintained by the processes of subtraction. The resident becomes a sojourner, not quite at home.

Curiously enough, it is often maligned post-modernism that has recognized the compulsive need in humans for a local habitation, a personal home. And, in its sometimes outrageous architectural expression of the idea of home, it has nevertheless recognized the primordial human need for intimate enclosure and the sensation of being protected and comforted within a deeply personal place. Think for a moment of one of these post-modern “mansions.” Think of all those small, crazy spaces, those nooks and crannies, towers and turrets, dormers and bays in which to go hide and be safe with one’s laptop, or maybe even a book.

Were I in position to do so, I would have placed between the two houses, between their garages fronting on Mesa Drive, the de facto point at which both houses define themselves-- I would have placed an heroic sculpture of a human being, at least in the scale of Michelangelo’s “David”, all naked and defiant. A statue that would announce to all the world that, “I, this human being, of unlimited consciousness, imagination, and soul, did build these two houses as homes for creatures like me.”

This late-modern “david” would be stunning placed just there to advise that these houses are in no wise robotic. They need only us, regular human beings, to occupy them and discover ways in which to make them uniquely our own, make them into convincing narratives of our imagination, our experience, and our dreams for the future.

~~~~~

An Apology for an Essay Just Below This

2010-05-12T11:53:00.001-07:00

    Friends to this blog, following these words of introduction is an essay that you may feel is too strange to bother with. It has almost nothing at all to do with angling and is exactly three times the length of the standard newspaper column of 800 words. Be warned.
    It might look like an article for a travel magazine; though I don’t think any self-respecting travel magazine would touch it. Therefore I’m blogging it to you good readers.
    A couple decades ago, I got seriously hooked (Ha! Note the angling metaphor that sneaked in) on Spain, the home stomping-ground of my much admired Don Quixote. He had read all those old books of great adventure and went mad in the pursuit of his own adventures and their dangerous enchantments. He was hooked on old chivalry and I was hooked on old him.
    I have a hunch that reading old books makes us all a little crazy. We do this insane thing of believing what we read and so enter worlds that never were and never will be. Worlds that makes us do irrational things for love, for a poetics of love and life that might be. We fall helplessly under their enchantment.
    Until, in the end, like Don Quixote we dwindle toward disenchantment which can be cruel and destructive-- or a beatitude of love’s memory. My reading of Don Quixote’s final disenchantment and return to the sanity and absolute reality of death is as a beatitude.
    I recommend Spain to you with its wild Spanish dons, Quixote best of all, and the terrible intensity of their crazy lives. Please consider reading below....

In Espagna, Mille e Tre

2010-05-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

A list of Spanish things

This man had somehow lost his wife in the intricacies of the Alcazar of Segovia. I got caught by his worry and so joined the search for her. Up and down the spiral stone staircase of the fortress tower I went, looking for the lost woman. Atop the tower, glancing out between the castellations to the west, out on to a vast, rolling, and golden plain, in that emptiness, I saw Quixote astride poor, broken down Rocinante. The great crazy Don in ancient, rusty plate, his beaver up, his lance held forward at that perfect 15 degrees off vertical. Bringing up the rear was Sancho on his beloved Dapple, faithful to the end, wondering what madness lay next ahead.

I forgot the lost wife and thought of that most enchanting, exquisite, immaterial Dulcinea, she who does or does not exist, Quixote’s lady. I poked my camera at that vista between the crenellations, out onto that gorgeous plain with Don Quixote, in his every splendor, riding by. That photograph hangs where I can see him now, The Knight of the Woeful Countenance, who so powerfully recommends to me his books, his madness, his enchantment, and his broken heart.

Dulcinea, Oh, Dulcinea! Might she be held somewhere in this tower?

~~~

A couple centuries later, another Spanish Don rode by ravishing women, any woman he could get his hands on, of whatever description, anywhere he could. Riding along was his man-servant, Leporello, who might as well have been Sancho Panza’s citified cousin. Leporello kept careful book on his master’s seductions, his “catalog”, he called it: women classified by the hundreds as to the countries where they fell prey to this ravishing Don Juan. Ah, but in Spain, “In Ispagna,” Mozart has him sing, “in ispagna, mille e tre.” In Spain he seduced one thousand and three.

Well, I want to turn Giovanni’s erotic violence around and say that Spain has ravished me by the count of at least 1003. And, like Leporello, on location with his master, in Seville, his catalog under his arm, I want to sing my own incoherent catalog of the dark joys of Spain-- of all that which ravished me.

~~~~

I would like to imagine myself, a proper pilgrim, with an eye on the heavens, to follow the Milky Way, The Way of Saint James, to Campostela, there to worship what I do not believe. But I shall have made that long walk out of the everyday conventions of secular Europe-major into the black Catholic mystery of Spain. I’m silly enough to imagine that a saint as powerful as James may look after me and help me to get even older and sillier, doing this sort of thing.

I feel under assault from every quarter of Spain’s (I dislike the word) magic, dark, violent, morbidly and sexually estranged-- all that a cold-blooded Swede like me cannot fathom.

There’s the great Quixote, the madman, riding past Segovia to God knows where in his search for the sublimities of adventure to lay at the feet of his beloved Dulcinea-- to honor and love her perfectly-- if only he can find her-- perhaps in that tower, anywhere.

I finished reading Cervantes for the first time within the shadows of the Alhambra, the exact locus-- that 1492-- of those immense shifts between Muslim, Christian Goth, and Jew. You hear that gypsy music full of Islamic yearning and you want to sit and cry. I think of the most admirable Washington Irving on embassy to Spain and living in the Alhambra, studying and loving it, He must have got that Moorish music of love pure and raw.

Good God, just outside that small presence chamber where Columbus made his proposition of immense treasure to Isabella, amid all that exquisite stone, I thought I was a goner. Stone and plaster and water, so beautiful as to steal all breath away toward a metabolism of fluid joy. There I came to understand the meaning of streams of cool, pure water purling down out of the mountains to these exquisite palace fountains. I think, as for the first time, what these waters meant to a desert people, these lovely waters. No wonder their paradise promised to be full of them. I love the resident golden fish, and catch myself imagining a trout living there, suspended in such a watery heaven of the spirit.

Just to be there at midnight! Listening to Taregga’s guitar in the near distance. So close to where Lorca-- here in his Granada-- was born and murdered-- he who taught me, my first lessons of Spain in his plays and poems, and his tragic death “at five in the afternoon.“ He sang that refrain for the death of the toreador Mejias. Beautiful, tragic Lorca, singing, acting, loving, dying. At five, maybe, in the afternoon. Daring and fearing the regime. Who could measure how Franco’s gang hated him! “Degenerate”, they cried, when what they most feared was that this poet carried the Spanish people in his poems. He was too dangerous to live. Think of that: the honor of having his poems making him too dangerous to live.

Much about Spain is too dangerous to live,

Maybe it’s this afternoon as I try to find a voice for, a rhythm, and an authority in all this-- like Bernard Shaw’s John Tanner, motoring along the Way of Saint James, through the Pyrenees to Spain, beset by bandits, near where Roland blew his horn to tell his Uncle Charlemagne that he had been faithful to the end and died.

In that numinous mountain place, Shaw’s John, “Jack” Tanner dreams away the night. He becomes the original, Spanish Don Juan Tenorio gone to hell to debate the Devil. This Shavian Juan must foreclose on Mozart’s Giovanni and his idea of a good “sex story”-- in Italian! Juan-Tanner sets out to demystify the mystic nonsense of the Devil, all that romantic tosh about sinful man in the everlasting fires of his sensual fun-- or perhaps all-consuming Spanish love and hate. Shaw’s Juan has no interest in sex qua sex, but rather he imagines the Superman who with pure intellect hitched to a newReality can fathom and regulate himself, and the world. It is a passion far greater and more sustainable than the Devil’s ordinary, prurient sex. Shaw’s-Juan’s passion is for the free, working, visionary, super-conscious intellect. It may be another as yet untried way of being Spanish… all that passion, I don’t know.

All these Dons, these wild caballeros. Only Quixote can hold my heart forever. There’s little sign of him in Seville where all the operas are set. Why is that so, in this beautiful city on the Guadalquivir? Was life imagined to be more dramatic in Seville during the great age of both classical and romantic opera. Is it because Giovanni could prey upon all the cigarette girls who with Carmen made “smokes” in their famous factory? So many operas are set in Seville, where “at five in the afternoon” we watch the bulls being killed so precisely and beautifully. Those bulls, in the sun-drenched arena, too dangerous to live. I thank my lucky stars that it was given to me to see this great ceremony of death.

I kissed the hem of the Virgin of Guadalupe at her church in her remote monastery, but nothing happened-- other than that I am still safely here. She was strange: I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Me and the Virgin-- kissing the one, true, and real Her!

The olives at the bar in the monastery garden and the dryness of the sherry were exquisite, perhaps a blessing from the world-renowned Virgin…. I wanted that afternoon to last forever.

Here you can rent an medieval monastery room for the night. I should liked to have rented a dozen and then hiked out to hug a cork oak tree, get its feeling into me, in honor of the fine cork grips on my fishing rods. Cork, like bamboo, is heaven-sent stuff.

And silk! Cork, bamboo-- and gut from the silk worm, Bombyx mori, worked by the ladies of Murcia, cutting out, pulling to length that gland of fluid silk, cut from the giant larva’s belly so that fishermen can fish and bulls die.

Beloved Cork! I wanted to run loose and crazy and see it all, and hear that Moorish music and feel the pounding drums of Islam. All this Andalusian other-worldliness. It permeates everything, everywhere.

Up in Madrid, things are harder, crisper, clearer, more sullen, and impersonal. But I had my revenge. I picked up three or four dozen molted flight quills from the wings of the famous white doves, La Paloma, of the gardens of the Prado where the Goyas hang ! The presence, the presence, of those dangerous pictures!

I smuggled the feathers home, past the Goyas, past customs and immigration in my inner coat pocket, to use them here at home on Rio Grande Kings and Royal Coachmen. And I got a lot of fourOclock seed by scrambling on my knees in the gardens of the Alhambra--to the dismay of honest tourists. Rare and moon-driven white fourOclocks.

Finally! A statue of Cervantes at a busy Madrid intersection. How had he managed to escape from slavery to the Moors to write this best of all stories while Shakespeare was making our theatre in London and Montaigne, inventing essays and dying of “the stone” in Bordeaux ? What kept the earth from spinning out of control given that triangulation of genius?

Cordoba boiled me in oil, whatever that means. But I saw where Maimonidies lived and thought-- and I wondered what, but for him, I might I be thinking today? It is said of Maimonidies that he may have had the most powerful intelligence in all the history of the species.

Toledo, Holy Jesus Christ! He was everywhere-- shot through the agonizing glories of El Greco. The view of the city from across the great river ravine, from where, as though to “memorize another Golgotha,” he painted it into our unconscious. To think that I could be allowed to see this as item in my mille e tre!

But I forget. Back in Granada, in the Chapel Royal, in huge majesty, there lay their majesties Ferdinand and Isabella themselves. It seemed too much to hold on to. And for that matter in the cathedral at Seville, in the south transept, is the quite overwhelming tomb of Columbus. I never would have believed that I could have cared that much about him-- or his bones. But I did, and his spectacular tomb haunts me still.

It is the fashion of the day to think of Columbus as a most dangerous man, which he was, no doubt. But for dangerous men of Spain, I am most deeply shaken, first, by the dictator, Generalissimo Franco and his fascist suppression of Spain in our last terrible century. On the road out of Madrid to the Escorial, suddenly looms Franco’s monstrous basilica at The Valley of the Fallen, carved from the living rock of the mountain, too huge, like St, Peter’s in Rome, too huge to take in. I glance around, worried, almost in fear of its brutal, sterile grandeur. There, beneath me, Franco lies. He built this place in his own honor and memory-- and to draw people, even like me, too him even yet. I want to get the hell out of there-- clear this place out of my head, and on to that next super-monument, the Escorial Monastery.

Philip II built it, this gigantic square structure, where he lived, worked, and died. Where everything else is huge, this tiny room was his office-study-retreat, like a hidey-hole, just off the chancel of the inner great church. From here the gout-stricken king could slip quite privately into the sanctuary for consolation and the sacraments. This little office-study, for a king of that magnitude, from which he managed all of Catholic Spain and its dominions! He made all of Spain into an auto de fe.

Then down the difficult stairs into the “Pantheon” room below the chancel where the Hapsburg kings and who knows who else, lie racked and stacked up on the side walls. Among all that royalty, who got dead for their pains, is Philip II, King of Spain, and much of Europe, by right of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Down in this chamber of the dead, Philip is nothing special. He must have been a tiny little man to require so small a coffin. I imagine that I hear Verdi’s Don Carlo, that music of death shrouded in Spanish black and gold.

Again, I thank my lucky anglophiliac stars that our Elizabeth would have nothing to do with this most dangerous Spaniard-- beyond sinking his invincible Armada, in that great storm of 1588. He was given the terrible news while at prayer in his church right here. I was shown the exact spot and trembled with the terrors of history. To think that someday, some nobody like me would trample the spot that his suffering had sanctified!

What’s at the root of it all? How should I know! It’s too much for me, and I’ve lost count of my 1003. It may have to do with Quixote’s invention of Dulcinea and our search for her, our Virgin. It may have to do with cork, and olives, and sherry, songs, and that unhappy dancing. Maybe it’s silkworms and Seville oranges. Or perhaps it’s the searing pain at Philip’s heart, the heart of Spain, all morbid black and gold and Catholic, that can approach the mystery? In any case, it’s ravishing, in one thousand and three ways.

2010-05-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Here is the place-- atop the tower of the Alcazaar of Segovia,
where I can see Don Quixote and Sancho riding by.

Blogging His Birthday Party

2010-04-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

    What with bad weather and all, celebration of my mere 84th. birthday came a cropper. But the weather will clear and those good birthday relatives will soon find their way here for dinner one way or another.
     In the meantime, I have begun to fantasize on the theme of an extravagantly impossible big 85th. party, here on the side of Lovers’ Hill, right smack down in this house in my grandfather’s back yard, where once he very nearly went to jail for fighting cocks. Ah! the baggage of antique memory.
Anyway, I think I should like to build a guest list of those who have welcomed the stuff I’ve written over the past twenty years-- and even read it.
    In my fantasy, these various good people would gather here late of an April afternoon to greet one another around a simple board, in the center of which is a wheel of what I believe to be the finest cheddar made, washed down with a good amontillado sherry or a dipper from a steaming bowl of bloody red sangria-- and hunks of fine warm bread. (coffee and beer in the kitchen for the needy)
    But, my chief-most offering would be the guests to each other, each to the other’s great pleasure. The trouble is that the guest list grows and grows and keeps on growing. At what point does it become impossible? When the company spills down the stairs, out into the street, all over the deck, stacking up in corners, what to I do then? This huge mass of angling humanity to whom I am so indebted?
    I dare not begin to list them here, all those whom I so admire. I'd like to bring them to Boulder where we can all meet and celebrate the astonishing, impossible fact of our being together. Will there ever have been such a gathering of angling people?
    I should want my kids from New Jersey on the one hand and California on the other to be here so that they can see for themselves what a marvelous bunch of people could be conglomerated on the occasion of their father’s birthday.
    I should think that all these guests would fall to the spirit of the day and wish each other, every one, a Happy Birthday, whenever it is.
    Then, and I shudder to see it, suddenly here come all those readers of The Bouldercreek Actor, all those dear friends and readers who in one way or another practice theatre crashing the party. Not to be kept away, they are sure to leaven the crowd and give it tone. They arrive as in a phalanx of the imagination and drama.
    Then, just when things are going strong, some one will call for “order”. When there is quiet and order established, in honor of the master Vince Marinaro, the noted baritone Patrick Mason will sing “The Song of the Letort Spring Run”, verses of mine and the great Ernest Schwiebert and composed by John Patrick Thomas. With this bit of music, in the spirit of the Milkmaid’s song in Walton’s Angler, we will bond the excellence of art to our angling. It will be everyone’s portion, right along with the cheese and sherry.
    I shall, in advance, have asked one particular guest to offer a Resolution to the company, because that is what the party will have become: the first and probably last plenary session of THE WHOLE AND ANCIENT COMPANY OF ANGLERS-- and fully competent to conduct its business.
    Therefore, following the song, Ms. Velma Biddle will, in her one hundred and second year, rise to move the motion, a Resolution for the Day. I cannot imagine what it might be, but I know that, from Velma, it will be exquisitely appropriate. Following her presentation of the Resolution, someone will move that the motion not be debated or amended. With that agreed upon, he will move a unanimous ballot, and the Resolution will be passed to general cheers and rejoicing-- clear out into the street where the sherry has reached.
    Betty, who in this virtual world did not have to labor at preparations, will be free to welcome and debrief everyone. Me, I shall sit quietly beside Velma, watching everyone enjoying everyone, and wondering at the power of language, and hooks and lines, sherries and cheeses, but most of all, wondering at this collection of people who glow so richly human-- in honor of the day they were born and were given to fish and read, and be together.
     As you read this, please know that your presence is requested next April 26, 2011, at this virtual birthday party, digital as it will be, deep in the secrets of this machine. Yes, it will be nothing less than The Whole and Ancient Company of Anglers-- (with actors and hangers-on). Do plan to come.

2010-04-17T08:25:00.001-07:00

And Trout Were Rising
    The day was gorgeous- down on Boulder Creek-- in the center of town where I was to show off Tenkara fly fishing tackle to any who cared to drop by. And about fifteen did. A remarkable event, it seemed to me. I showed them how to extend the rod to eleven feet and to attach the eleven foot line to it. I have thought that method and act of attachment to be just plain “charming” and so did they. I showed the rig’s casting versatility on the creek and gave everyone a chance to try it. As a friend has put it, Tenkara fishing is so “new, different, and old”.
    But the point I want to make is that the whole event was new, different, and old. These people were so cordial, open, friendly, and gently eager. I can’t remember quite the same sort of gathering , that sort of behavior among anglers. They were eager but patient, reticent but persistent, friendly with a slight formality, really smart but modest, everyone of them bringing some personal excellence, for which I had to pry to learn. This is not the way right down regular post-modern people on the make are expected to behave in this day and age. They stayed an hour. I was exhilarated.
    The thing is, dear reader, that this is but another bit of evidence that things have changed in fly fishing. It is indeed the Sixth and New Period in American fly fishing. Anglers are renewing themselves, refreshing themselves. And, most of all, looking for and craving simplicity. The strains of economic recession, wars and rumors of wars, even a volcanic cloud out of Iceland have tended to turn us inward, to find a new habitation for the spirit, nearer to the heart’s desire.
    Some have said that Tenkara partakes of Zen in its processes. I’m wary of such claims and doubt this one, but, that said, there is in Tenkara the possibility of discovering a new sort of complexity, but now, in simplicity. A deep complexity in that which is simple-- what the artist is working at, forward and back, in and out. I must not claim too much for something as basic and old-- and different and new-- as Tenkara. But there it is….
    It leads us, I think, to the conclusion that we have “profited” as much as we can and are now moved beyond the largely mechanical complexities of the TU Period with its competitions, anxieties, and great power. It’s over. Now the flicking, gentle cast of the Tenkara fly is a modeling of the new sensibility.
    And if that is hard to believe, you should have been on the creek that day to see that new sensibility clearly manifest in those fifteen New Period anglers throwing that hookless fly-- as good trout sipped at the surface.

Tenkara Revealed on Boulder Creek

2010-03-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, April 14, at the stroke of twelve noon, on Boulder Creek, at the Public Library south parking lot, off Arapahoe, between the two bridges, I shall show, demonstrate, and allow casting with the fabulous Japanese Tenkara rig. Do come by for a moment of your lunch hour, and have a look at something at once new and refreshing, yet ancient and comforting-- this astonishing method of fishing the fly on smaller waters for fish under a pound.
Weather permitting, of course. If it's bad, I shall sulk at home.

2010-03-24T13:47:00.003-07:00

    You might call this “Learning to Blog by Hit and Miss”. Anyhow, below is an essay that I have worked and re-worked and now really kinda like. I like writing about things that might not otherwise be noticed, or, as in this case, not noticed as I think they should be. Trouble is, there seems to be no ordinary outlet for this story. It was too long for the paper Bouldercreek
Angler, and trouble is, it may be too long for a proper blog. So, look it over, see what you think, or throw up your arms in despair and move a-field to fairer blogs by clearer streams and bluer skies in our cybernetic Arcadia. GMW-

The Rods of Lyons

    I’ve gone through Lyons time out of mind, ever since it was a single-lane dirt road up to Estes. There in its bowl of beautiful sandstone red cliffs is Lyons, Colorado, an attractive little town, a memory of the Old West, once strategic at the confluence of the two Saint Vrain Creeks, and at the exact point of rising of the Rocky Mountains. Now it's a gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park and the exact location of South Creek; Ltd., where Mike Clark builds internationally celebrated cane fly rods.
    I think of what it must be like to come to Mike’s place for the first time, of the suspense, and excitement of it all. An angler of my imagining may have made the momentous decision to move beyond his round graphite rods and get himself a lifetime treasure: a custom-built cane fly rod from the hands of the distinguished Mike Clark.
    A bundle of nerves, our angler pulls up in front of the fine old-time red sandstone business building on the south side of Lyons's one block long Main Street and wonders at the deep purple trim of Mike's store front. Purple!
    Once out of his car, he timidly peers though the old fashioned store windows, to see what he can which is not much. But what he can see is altogether different from what he's come to expect at "fly shops." There's none of that "Come On In, Anglers-- Big Sale Today”, enticement common and identical to identical fly shops everywhere. This place is different.

Once Inside
    Our client, with some trepidation, opens the front door and steps into the deep quiet of a twelve by twenty room, inimitable and unique, filled with angling gear and artifacts, with racks of antique and restored cane rods, cases of reels, lines, books, invaluable collections of old flies on the walls, and new flies expensively for sale-- all selectively stocked and displayed, first class stuff, in fine cabinetry and under enticing glass. Good Grief! Just look at it!
    Fine trout art graces the walls, even the carpets underfoot. High on the east wall is a painting on board by Ken Iwamasa of a brown trout seven! feet long that I have long coveted. In each front corner of this front room are great signature racks of Tonkin bamboo culms, racked from floor to ceiling, stunning in their wheaten beauty and exotic provenance. That most wondrous, heavenly, of grasses, good for almost everything, out of which nearly everything needful to human life can be made.
    Our client, now in overload, awe-struck at all the stuff so cunningly and artfully displayed, moves carefully, if not gingerly, about, wondering what to do next, trying hard to take it all in as fully as he can.
    This is no ordinary “shop”: it is in fact a studio, an atelier, where a master might hold sway and court important clients who want to commission a masterwork. There's a peculiar formality and classical character to it.

Who’s She!
    It's too much to take in all at once; the client tries to pull himself together, before "facing the music"-- for there, straight in front of him, curtains draping the entry, is the work-room proper. Clark's work-bench is dead in the center with the master himself standing at the right, at his steel planing forms. Just a bit impatient at being interrupted in his work, in a moment he comes to meet our client, with that notoriously enigmatic smile, good looking, what with that curiously gray-blonde seaman's queue dipping down his back. Our client feels on the spot, uneasy, off balance, not sure whether he's exactly welcome or not.
    He steals glances at the myriad and compelling details of this larger work room, everywhere, up and down, in every corner, on every wall, on every shelf, in every nook and cranny, rod building stuff to excite the angler's fascinated curiosity. This is the back room of a veritable museum where treasures are stored and the hard work done.
    Then, anxious for a hint, for some help with what's next, he spots Kathy at her work bench along the west wall. There she sits, Kathy Shulkin-Jensen winding the guides to a rod, maybe one Mike has just finished-- or perhaps a fine old Payne or Granger sent in for her to restore to its original glory.
    You may have seen old-time photographs of the famous old rod building shops of the past. Men building the rods, women finishing them. They were invariably a frumpy looking lot, badly dressed, and embarrassed by the camera. Cane fly rods? They could as well have been making ax handles.
    But here in Lyons, in Mike Clark's South Creek, the woman, in this extraordinary shop, is Kathy, of the nicely hyphenated name, a woman, tall, dark, slender, smart, aristocratic, slightly exotic, her powerful eyes full of intelligence, vitality, and welcoming. Kathy rises from her bench to greet the client, her hand extended. At last he begins to feel welcome while still swamped in the allure of the place.
    At this point, allow me, your author, to step in and take over from that imaginary "client." I'm here in his place now in the back room of this studio to talk to Mike and Kathy to learn all I can for this very article. Where, for instance, do Kathy and Mike come from!
    This is clearly Mike's studio, his creation; it pre-dates Kathy. But for these last eight years, she’s been here, Kathy, graceful, glamorous, finely spoken, more often than not taking over from Mike to explain the ins and outs of ordering a rod, explaining why it will take four and a half years to get high enough on the list for Mike to build it. She lionizes him.
    She explains how a client will, in time, come to choose his rod's every cosmetic detail and casting characteristic. Every rod from South Creek; Ltd. is altogether custom built for the particular customer, there being no "standard," no "name-brand" grade to be had. She’ll help him choose.
    When Kathy joined Clark those eight years ago, when she and her husband moved to Lyons from California, neither of them knew the first thing about fishing, fly or otherwise, but quickly "got into it" even taking some lessons.
    Mike had come to that point in his business where he needed help. Someone to wrap the rods would help a lot. Somehow Kathy wandered into the picture and was sent home to practice wrapping to see if the work suited her. It did. She learned quickly and mastered it. From that point on she became a lover of cane rods herself, rods old and new. And, she says, with Mike at her elbow, she planed and built a rod of her own-- so she knows, at what she calls her “modest level”, how it's done.
    She refers everything back to Mike, "Mike says this," "Mike believes that." She told me that when a customer comes in, she can help him a lot, but the customer has to be assured that he's going to get a rod that Mike built, not the work of an "apprentice". She would never presume to split or plane a strip of cane for Mike. She'd never dip a rod in the final varnish. I noticed that Mike himself was doing the final rub-down polish on a set of his glowing sticks.
    Interestingly enough, Kathy began to take on the simpler repair jobs on rods that anglers brought in. This led to her successful rod restoration service. She's inordinately proud of the pains she takes to restore an old rod to as nearly its original, authentic condition as possible. She specializes in careful research into the rod's original, right-from-the-manufacturer condition. She tells me how wonderful it is to have all those great rods of the great cane rod tradition passing through her hands. She feels it's a privilege-- and an inspiration-- all those old Paynes, Leonards, Grangers, Gillums, Thomases, Garrisons, Powells!
    Kathy not only wraps, repairs, and restores rods, and does the book work, but she's often out fishing herself, usually with Mike. Of her pleasure in fishing, she says that "you can't go anywhere but fishing when you're fishing." That’s deep and bears remembering.... She speaks of fishing's utter and healing need for concentration and regrets all the years that she didn’t do it.
    A momentary cloud passes over our conversation, when she remarks that she would not fish alone-- a woman ought not to…. I think of my daughter’s exact, same sentiment. It's sad.
    She wanted me to know that she could never before have imagined her life in a business like rod building; yet, she was not altogether unprepared. She had worked professionally in businesses in California--and had been raised around the fine hand-work of her father and mother, both artists by avocation. And now she brings to Mike’s studio the refinement of sensibility that work with cane requires and is essential in its tradition. If, dear reader, as you have trundled along to the water, you have never held the two or three sticks of a bamboo fly rod at your side, never felt their aliveness in your hand, if you've never felt how eager a cane rod is to get out there and work for you.... well, you owe it to yourself to have that experience. It can change you.
    Kathy's certain that cane, even the idea of cane, works its way on the clients who come in the front door. She's full of praise for them, for their gentility, their courtesy, their deep appreciation of what they are about to do, get on a four-year waiting list for a Mike Clark fly rod.
    I could argue that at that moment of entering this inner sanctum of rod making on Main Street in Lyons, Colorado, Kathy herself becomes a part of that rod-to-be-- a part of the never to be forgotten experience. The Master Builder in all his masculine rigor, is one thing. But the feminine complement to the place, and in the rods, is the advocacy of art.

The Tools
    Kathy notwithstanding, this is the work-room of a master craftsman. There's all the paraphernalia of rod building: the essential planing forms, the strange looking varnish dipping tube with its simple but sophisticated rigging for lowering and raising the rod joint, the lathe, the rod winding apparatus. But I'm always brought up short to realize how few tools and what minimal machinery cane rod building requires. It's, in fact, pretty "low tech." Low on tech and high on craft. And it doesn't take much space.
    Mike, as a courtesy to the author, I'm sure, pulls open several large drawers full of supplies, myriad silk threads antique and new, the finest cork rings for grips I've ever seen, and in one a huge collection of ferrules, old and new, many from rod builders of the past whose rods may come in for repair or Kathy's restoration. The entire craft of rod building is filed away in these drawers.
    This remarkable studio is an amazing blend of artifact, personality, and commercial enterprise; and only out of recognition of the current recession is there no longer the customary dozen American Beauty red roses on a counter out front.

About Mike
    Mike has over the years had a good press. He’s been written about a lot. In fact one of those drawers he pulled open was liberally stuffed with press cuttings. So, his story's been told, about the Mike Clark who began making rods thirty years ago after leaving big-time excavation and construction work, professing to want to get out of the "rat race" and into something that could really satisfy him. And, I suggest, something that would not deny the artist in him. He says he was willing to trade the affluence of his days in construction for the "poverty" of rod making.
    As did so many of our finest craftsmen and women today, Mike Clark came from out the tumult of the Sixties where rescuing the all but lost crafts of an older and simpler time could be a thumb in the eye of the managers of a sickening war and all the social ills and resentments that for so long had been accumulating on the late-American experience. I believe that we cannot otherwise understand the amazing renaissance of fine crafts that we find everywhere today.
    Mike seems almost as much a curator of a collection of valuable angling artifacts and memorabilia as he does a builder and merchant of rods. Yes, it's like a tiny museum, a stepping out of time, out of the hurly-burly of contemporary fly fishing mania into a place where the great tradition as once we knew it is quietly nourished and protected, even insisted upon. And yet, Mike remains something of a mystery to me, something deeply private about him. I leave his studio wishing I had spoken better and asked better questions. I leave uneasy, wondering what he must be thinking of me. In his retiring way, Mike is running the show.

The End
    It's like the discovery of a lost time in American fly fishing. There's surely the gratifying sense of stepping back into the greatness of the fly fishing tradition, to its Golden Age, untouched by the tubular carbon rod with which the contemporary angler "attacks" the water. Such is the spirit of this place.
    Kathy may praise the clients who come in the front door as paragons of angling excellence, but I suggest that just walking through that front door is a transforming experience for the client. And bamboo is the key. I suggest that bamboo can open up for the angler secrets of the most opulent pleasure.

2010-03-12T11:44:00.001-08:00

Begging Your Patience

     It’s snowing out, and this blog is now ready for your reader’s comment. I won’t presume to tell you how to use it; rather I shall beat a retreat into cover and hope that your comments will not be as harsh as doubtless I deserve, Look at it if you will.
     And bear with me as I try to get my bearings in this mode of publication. I scarcely know what to do with it. I would really like to maintain something of the four-times-a year quarterly publication of paper Bouldercreek Angler. But that may be hard to do. Still, I do not want and will not let it become a chatty, every day sort of account of what I presume to be of interest to you.
     I want to show you pieces of writing that I have worked over, revising and rewriting them, until nothing casual or too heated is left. Just like the old paper gazette.
     Being expert at being old, as I claim to be, probably ought to include knowing when it’s time to shut up….
     In any case, let me work on it a while. It must have a discipline.
     I’m told that if you subscribe to the blog, you will somehow be notified when something new is posted. ~~~
     As the snow keeps coming on, let me tell you that a few days ago an old friend sent me an old copy of an old issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal for April/May,1976-- an issue in which I had an essay on catch and release. That was thirty-one years ago. I thought that anglers were not looking hard enough at the ideology of no-kill, and so I should do it for them. As I re-read the essay now, it sounds all right, but the penultimate sentence caught me: pretty much what I believe today, and it’s in connection with my proposal of a sixth, The New Period, in American fly fishing.
     Here’s that sentence: “Now let us go a-stream more like our fathers-- individual, unself-conscious, unreconstructed, and quiet with our streamcraft and our love more important than our equipage and image.” But how, I wonder, can I both blog and, at the same time, in Walton’s use of Scripture, study to be quiet….?
      It’s snowing now, those great, beautiful, sloppy spring flakes. For us Westerners they fill the air with promise-- and are superbly quiet.

2010-02-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

On Blogging Late in an Angler's Life

    Here follows the substance of the last and final edition on paper of The Bouldercreek Angler-- after eleven years and forty-four numbers! In this last paper issue I proposed to divide the history of American fly fishing into six periods. I had thought to strike a blow for freedom. I wanted to get this idea of periods into circulation and possibly into accepted usage. It may well be an exercise in vanity, I admit to that; but I am now grown so old that I feel quite free to do anything I damn well please, even to presume to divide our sport into historical periods. I figured it needed to be done; so I did it, and mailed it out to my list of 150 good old, cherished readers. Somehow those 150 had always felt to me an adequate circulation of my vanities. They are a bunch of really excellent people.
And so here I am on this February 26, 2010, writing directly onto my new blog, for the first time and without the aid or interference of Microsoft Word. I feel stunned. I can't believe it. After the many entreaties from the mailing list to preserve the BCA on paper, its single little page of convenience and concision, it's difficult to change. I suppose it was inevitable that I should run out of the steam necessary to handling the paper mailing.
    No surprise, then, that this blog was urged upon me. Helpers hurried to my assistance to get it up and underway. It leaves me a bit dizzy. Not only am I given a new lease on the life of my ancient-of-age writing, but it may just get this "periods" idea out to a much wider audience. But then, on the other hand, it's hard for me to believe that any but a "designated few" would ever slow down to do their reading off computer monitors.... Will they?
   And, I can never forget that, like our beloved mayflies, our ephemera, this blog is as ephemeral as they come, here today, gone tomorrow, into the oblivion that must also be the destiny of our mammalian flesh. Still, as I write this essay, I feel suddenly and utterly free, free to write in any way that pleases me, for as long and as many words as ever I want-- and any way I damned-well please. And you, my reader, may read it or not as you please-- and at no charge in time or, as they say, treasure.
   Ah, that infinite digital space! I get all excited as I write this. I think of Montaigne and how in the seclusion of his castle in France, almost 500 years ago, he invented the essay, and wrote what are the original and finest of them all. I rather think, that at this moment, I would have his blessing. He would say to me, "Let 'er rip! Go ahead, and don't spare the horses!" He would authorize me.
    And so I write about what it is for an old man, who should know better, to try to change his life, turn it around in order to flog the notions, ideas, experiences that are his special burden. It becomes my privilege to so scatter them about on this blog. We old folks figure we have been around the block a couple times, have seen some things twice, and so stake our claim to a degree of authority,
    God in heaven, but it is wonderful to write English sentences!
    Those sentences allow me to dream of these six periods in the history of chucking flies, mostly to trout, but to any poor damned fish lucky enough to get the chance to strike at them. I am drawn into literary fantasies. As I plotted and laid out this chart of the periods, I thought of Long John Silver and the treasure map of Treasure Island, that fearsome chart. We are all like kids with maps of treasure in our heads, charts to follow at our peril to riches-- or death, or both. Not unlike the digital oblivion to which this piece must come.
    Please, then, cherished old readers of that list of 150, if you by chance shall come upon this, allow me to carry on, messing around in this electronic way. Who knows? The oblivion of ideas is infinite, and in its strange waters may lie the best fishing after all.
   I close now, recommending to you that simple, exquisite, lovely long, long rod, with its gossamer line fixed most elegantly dead-off at the top, for that ancient way of flicking a fly now here and now there, in the manner of Tenkara. It is a sign of newly dreamed of times, The New Period, into which we must go rejoicing-- or die, or both.

2010-02-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

SIX PERIODS IN THE HISTORY

OF AMERICAN FLY FISHING

Periods One, Two and Three

The Eastern Dominance

In the beginning there was:

The Beginning: 1845–1900

Samuel Phillippi: the split- bamboo rod

Thaddeus Norris: how an American must fish

Washington Irving: first modern fishing story

And then there was:

The Identity Period: 1900–1920

Theodore Gordon: the dry fly defined

George La Branche: the dry fly in fast water

James Leisenring: the wet fly and nymph

Then:

The Golden Age: 1920–1944

Jim Payne: the fly rod perfected

Walt Dette: Catskill fly tying

Ray Bergman: story, lore, and tackle

Setting the tone

**

Periods Four, Five and Six

The Western Ascendancy

Followed by:

The Transitional Period: 1945–1960

War, the spinning reel, and tailwaters

Ted Trueblood: the beautiful angler

Vincent Marinaro: the American master

A. J. McClane : the complete authority

The TU Period: 1960–2008

Catch and release wild fish

The Great Expansion

Technological advance and rise of synthetics

Commercialization and a global economy

And now:

The New Period: 2009–

End of expansion

Reconsideration, reform, and restoration

Older and simpler methods and satisfactions

Tenkara, ancient fly fishing from Japan

Tenkara USA

2010-02-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

                                       Tenkara Comes to Colorado

        On precisely September 18 of this year, 2009, just before noon, Betty and I took off on our annual, ritual drive into the mountains, into the aspen gold-- before leaving for London in a few days. I hoped and believed that Betty had packed a good lunch, which for us has the power to redeem most every sorrow.

The aspen, however, were not our sole reason for leaving town: we had with us a brand new Tenkara fly fishing outfit, fresh from Japan by way of Mr. Daniel Galhardo’s new company in San Francisco. This minimalist outfit consists of an eleven foot, supremely light telescopic carbon rod, with neither guides nor reel seat-- because no reel is used-- and an eleven foot furled line to be attached, readily attached and detached, to the rod’s tip. To this one adds three or more feet of 5x tippet.

With a few flies, both mine and the authentic Tenkara kind from Japan, we were set for a trial run in Boulder Creek. Well up the canyon on the way to the aspen, we pulled off to check the creek and give Tenkara a try. We would, we felt sure, on this day, be introducing Tenkara into the history of Colorado’s fly fishing.

The first cast or two left me disoriented and frustrated. Why? Because with this ancient Japanese tackle and method, I was able to cast not one inch farther than twenty-five feet-- plus the length of my arm. The length of the cast is absolutely fixed at the length of rod, plus an equal length of line and tippet. The furled monofilament line (U S made) is more like a long tapered leader-- all airy and delicate. It’s all but impossible to make a sloppy cast with it.

The rod is no more than maybe three ounces, all the sections nestling into the twenty-inch butt section with its fine cork grip. It’s amazingly neat and attractive. With the line and tippet coiled on its tippet spool in my pocket, we thrashed our way through the willows down to a riffle, now in extremely low water. A few small fish were rising sporadically. On this momentous occasion, I fastened the line to the rod tip’s bit of red Dacron with a girth hitch, tied on a Caribou Captain, and got after them. One word seems right to describe this setting up: “charming”, a just plain charming thing to do, to remind me that there are still grand old things left to do in life.

And then came the big shock, that first short cast, a cast that could not be extended. It seemed so short, too short, even on so small a creek in such low water.

I had to get used to it, to the idea that there was to be no reaching out, no shooting, no double-hauling, just flicking, dancing, dabbing the fly here and there. I began to feel like a conductor with his baton conducting the water’s musical intimacies. I worked close, and rapidly, changing, adjusting angle and distance of cast as fast as I could think about it. And with the threat of hanging up in trees and snags all but gone! And almost impossible to put fish down with that harsh, splashing cast that we all dread making with conventional tackle.

It's really different, this fishing; for instance, this poor old left hand of mine, which for seventy years, has been managing my casts, acting as their mastermind. Now it had nothing to do but ride along a bit restlessly in and out of my pocket-- in its bewildered retirement.

I found myself intensely concentrated on the fly, watching it so clearly and so close. It really is a different, ancient old way of fishing, That gossamer line whisping through the air in response to the rod’s foot long delicate tip section.

Well, anyway, I missed three or four fish, and they missed me. Fishing small streams like this is the as advertised purpose of Tenkara: and for fish not much bigger than twelve inches. I had now done it!
So, I gathered the short line easily to my hand and “took down” with the same sense of pleasure with which I had set up. Rolling up the line on that little spool and stuffing it in my pants pocket felt like some kind of return to first things.

That simple, easy, almost casual experiment finished, we drove on to the lake for lunch, a fine, aspen-lovely, perfect day-- without a fish showing. So, we spent an indolent hour eating, resting, and feeding two prideful Stellers jays with bits of Betty’s sandwich. I love those birds for their crests, their powerful dark blue, and their restless wit.

I was then ready to go home, which Betty would not allow. We were there, and nothing would do but for me to get down to the lake and exercise Tenkara. It’s an age-old marriage trope of ours: I get tired or discouraged and want to go home: Betty refuses, and I pout, but she insists that I fish some more: and she’s always right. I almost always get exceptional fish for my abject obedience.

And so today it had to be Tenkara on still water over some worrisomely big trout. What if one of them should hit…. A close-in, band of water weed circles most of the lake. Big trout are always cruising along it. With Tenkara, quickly rigged again, with a big Stimulator sort of dry, I wet my toes in order to reach out to whisk the fly over the far side of the weed bed, when of a sudden, out of nowhere, came this, I think, hybrid cutthroat, two-and-a-half or three pounds, and took a pass at my fly-- and we both missed. Shaken, I flicked the fly back to that same spot, maybe a dozen feet away. And he came back again, rushed the fly, and took.

The crazy fish turned and immediately took off for deep water with my line, leader, and fly tied dead-off to the rod’s slender tip. Going straight away. What could I do with him? Nothing! All was predestined, foretold in the Gestalt of the equipment. All I could hope to do was protect that equipment by pointing the rod at the racing fish allowing him to break off the fly. Snap!

I want to tell you, it was a great and joyous, experience! I want to do it again-- and again. It’s not our awkward, messy old “catch and release”. It was having to do with a fine fish that over-powered and thrilled me with his attentions and then went free in style.

I wondered if this fish could have had any idea of his contribution to the developing history of American fly fishing in these, the early years of The New Period of American fly fishing.
                                                                     ~~~~

tarrifs: rod $166
           line $20
           flies 3 for $7.50